


The Time Traveller's Life

by LittleRit



Series: The Time Traveller's Life [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Asexual Number Five | The Boy, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Good Sibling Klaus Hargreeves, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by The Time Traveler's Wife, Loneliness, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Trauma, the apocalypse (umbrella academy)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 49,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27102931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRit/pseuds/LittleRit
Summary: Five is chronologically challenged.Ever since he was five years old, Five has been time travelling uncontrollably to different points in his and Klaus’ lives - whether he has experienced them already or not. The displacements were mostly harmless when he was a child, and an older Klaus would sneak him out for doughnuts - but they became a lot more important after he stranded himself in the apocalypse, figuring out how to survive, and how to stop it all from ever happening.Or: How would Five’s survival in the apocalypse, and his mission to save his family, be affected if he couldn’t control his time-travelling?
Relationships: Dolores & Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy), Number Five | The Boy & Klaus Hargreeves
Series: The Time Traveller's Life [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926658
Comments: 312
Kudos: 305





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Feb 2021: If you are concerned by any of the tags (like the MCD) and want to ask about them** before deciding to read just drop me a message on Tumblr @LittleRit and I'll give you a heads up on what it's for so you can decide if its for you or not.
> 
> There is a prologue to this story as part 1 of the series, but you do not need to have read it before starting this one. You don't need any knowledge of time travellers wife to enjoy this story, and it's _not_ a cross over, I've just borrowed the premise of uncontrollable time travel.

**Five is around 39 years old (and 13).**

“Fuck.”

Five sighs, hand rising to catch the ash falling from the sky. For once, he doesn’t feel the lack of clothing from his displacement so much, the pockets of fire still burning making the air hot and smoky. He coughs to try to clear his lungs (pointless) and runs his hands through his dark beard in an attempt to remove the ash that is turning it grey.

He knows when he is.

The air had remained heavy and the skies overcast for months, but the fires had only burnt for the first few days after his original arrival into the apocalypse. The ash had stopped falling from the clouds a few days after the fires had burnt out, but any gust of wind could lift it from where it had settled like a cheap and dirty imitation of snow. Until the first winter, when enough rain had fallen to turn the ash to a heavy and dirty slush, his neckerchiefs had been up there as priority clothing to try to keep the worst of it from choking his lungs.

He scouts around for anything resembling clothing, already knowing it is only going to be a partial success. Five doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the moment when he looked up from finding the bodies of his siblings to see a dirty, naked man climbing over the rubble in nothing but a pair of beaded sandals and a scraggy beard.

Beggars can’t be choosers, but if he could choose only one thing to find in the apocalypse then shoes would be his choice. There are a lot of things he does _not_ want to stand in, and the heat of the fires on the rubble is enough to burn even his heavily calloused feet.

When he finally spies the sandals from his memories, he kneels to remove them with efficient and impersonal hands. Whoever the lady who had owned them was, she had been crushed by the collapsed building so thoroughly that only her lower legs are poking out from the concrete. He gives a half-hearted tug to what looks like the bottom of a skirt, but the fabric is too well pinned to recover. Not for the first time he curses his inability to displace with even a knife in hand.

The shoes are a little short for his feet - his heels left hanging over the back edges - but at least he has something.

He stands and looks around, trying to spot a familiar landmark or something he can use to orientate himself. It is not as easy as he had hoped – he had moved on from his home city over twenty years ago when the supplies had run out. Towards the end of summer, he had often limited his jumps to save up the energy he needed to make the increasingly long-distance annual pilgrimage to his siblings' graves. After all this time away, rubble looks like rubble, looks like rubble, looks like _more_ rubble.

Fuck it. He doesn’t recognise where he is, but he knows where he _will_ be, or needs to be.

He jumps.

The Glade, as he called it in an attempt to make it sound nicer, is a near perfect circle of concrete amongst the hills of crumbled brick, plaster and concrete and the trees of structural steel – the arched skeletons of the large building that must have once stood here.

He begins to climb out, scrambling up the loose slopes and swearing as pockets of heat burn his fingertips, or his toes catch on sharp edges. He is just cresting the top of the pile, about to straighten up when he hears the gasp.

And there he is.

God, he looks pitiful. His face is smeared with ash, and he has already lost the tie from his uniform (using it to tie Dolores safely into the trailer if he remembers correctly...). His eyes are wide and terrified, red from irritation and the tears make muddy streaks down his cheeks as his chest heaves with sobs.

Young Five is crouched beside Klaus, his hands are paused from where they had been tracing the cold _Goodbye_ over and over on the palm of his hand. They stare wide-eyed at one another, and _shit_ it may have been a long, long time for him now, but the grief still kicks him in the gut just the same when he sees Klaus pale, and cold, and lifeless in the rubble.

“Hey, Five,” he rasps.

Young Five doesn’t move. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You. After about 20 years or so in this shithole,” Five says. He doesn’t mince his words. His younger self doesn’t need platitudes right now; he needs a tow rope. An assurance he will survive, because he remembers that at this moment, surrounded by the desolation, yet to find any water and sitting with the remains of his family, he hadn’t been able to see how he would survive the week.

“What?”

“Yeah, sorry,” he grunts, eyeing up the slope and deciding he would rather not break a leg. He blinks to the clear patch of ground behind young Five, who startles and spins around. He scans the rubble, finds the dirty red velvet chair he remembers and pulls the hinged seat down so he can sit. He crosses one leg over the other to try and maintain some decency, rather than leaving it all hanging right at young Five’s eye level.

He sighs. “Welcome to the Apocalypse.”

“I... I can’t go back?” young Five whispers, looking more convinced at who he is talking to now he has seen him jump, even as a dust covered hand reaches up to rub his red eyes as if he can’t believe what he is seeing. “I’m really stuck?”

Five softens. “We’re trying. It’s a lot of calculations and most of the books we need didn’t survive the fires.”

He remembers the build-up to the day he had jumped, how a few weeks before their thirteenth birthday a clean-shaven old-man Five had begun appearing to them at night after curfew, or very early before breakfast. He had never seen himself much older than early teens before, so it was a shock, but easily overlooked when he had spent miserable hours having advanced math and physics crammed down his throat when he should have been sleeping. He had retained very little of it, for it was far beyond the math which Pogo had been schooling all the children in (and to make it worse he didn’t even particularly _like_ math).

At the time he had assumed it was to prepare him to take the next step and control his time travel. So, he’d applied himself to learning it, however reluctantly. He just assumed that the old man had oozed frustration because at the time Five was still more interested in perfecting his spatial jumps and tackling missions with his siblings than learning new powers.

Now, with the benefit of age and experience, he knows it was a desperate move to try and teach himself what he would need to get _back._

Young Five looks utterly miserable as more fat tears spill down his cheeks. Older Five has to bite his tongue to prevent himself from snapping about how he can’t afford to waste body fluids like that, clean water is going to be too scarce.

“Four is dead,” little Five whimpers.

“Yes.”

“...And One, and Two, and Three...” his younger self sobs, still grasping at Klaus’ hand. “...But I can’t see Six or Seven. Did they survive?”

“I haven’t seen anybody,” he hedges.

“Shit.”

And yes, that about sums it up, Five thinks miserably. He shuffles forward off the seat and crouches, drawing young Five to him and ignores how he flinches initially, letting him sob into his shoulder. He rubs a hand across the back of his younger self’s jacket, and muses how in a way it is lucky he does get displaced in time, because otherwise he would have gone at least two decades (so far) without real touch, without any company other than Dolores. He loves her dearly, but her hugs provide little in the way of softness and warmth.

And if a few tears of his own trickle into his beard as he looks over his shoulder at his brother’s body?

Well, there’s nobody left to judge.

* * *

**Five is 13**.

It takes a week after landing in the apocalypse before Five displaces himself again.

There were no warning signs this time, the typical churning and clenching of his gut going unnoticed amongst the rest of his body’s complaints. His scavenging has been impulsive and largely unsuccessful, and his digestive system has paid the price. So far, Five has found little of the right foods, and has interspersed that with eating stuff that has been contaminated or spoilt, in increasingly desperate attempts to appease the hollowness inside him.

He is surprised it has taken him this long, considering he has been living in state of constant emotional and growing physical stress since he arrived.

Tired and thirsty after another poor day of scavenging, he goes to lift Dolores from the trailer and instead finds himself stumbling into a bookcase. At first, it is all he can do to stay upright, gripping tightly to the grey metal shelves. He trembles as he stares at the rows of clean, colourful and _whole_ books, pulling shaking breaths through his teeth.

When he finally tears his gaze away, his eyes water from the brightness of the white strip lights. Luckily, nobody seems to have seen the dirty, trembling naked boy having a breakdown amongst the aisles – or at the very least nobody is shouting at him.

He gasps when he sees Dolores next to a crumpled set of clothes, her familiar polka dot blouse looking cleaner than he has ever seen it. She’s sat at the base of a wall covered in equations, and he finds a black sharpie half-tucked into the pocket of the shorts. His fingers tremble as he pulls on the uniform, eyes darting from Dolores to the empty aisles and back again, as he tightens the belt past its well-worn groove.

He hasn’t got a clue why there is an academy uniform in his size existing alongside Dolores in a pre-apocalyptic library, but at this point he doesn’t care. He sniffles as he straightens his shirt collar and then turns to sit next to Dolores with his back to the math, legs sprawled over the books strewn on the floor. Just one glance at the equations and he can tell it is too advanced for him, he doesn't have a clue what it is about.

In fact, he’s not sure some of the symbols aren’t made up entirely.

His eyes water and his stomach grumbles as he wraps an arm around Dolores, bringing her closer so that he can pretend her arm is curled around him in turn. It feels like something from a dream, yet he can’t find the strength to leave this little corner of the world where everything seems okay.

There is a clink of glass.

Five looks up from where he has begun to curl into Dolores and spies a bottle of clear, clean liquid (more recently known as: a miracle). He hears a whining noise as he reaches around her to grasp the bottle by the neck, but he ignores it, too busy being grateful the bottle is already opened as he lifts it to his lips, desperate to wet his mouth and soothe his dry throat.

The strong flavour and the way it burns is enough to have him spluttering on his mouthful, but he chokes it down, determined not to waste a drop. He is so thirsty, the last of his clean water had ran out the night before and he hadn’t found any when he’d weakly sifted through the rubble that day.

He has never had alcohol before (because its either that or drain cleaner he is drinking). It is sharp and burning and he wants to heave when it hits his stomach, but he keeps sipping away, determined not to waste it. Not when he doesn’t have the energy to jump anywhere else or find anything better.

He has learnt very quickly not to waste resources.

***

When he comes too, his head is swimming. He groans as he feels his stomach sloshing, slowly realising he is moving. The air is cool, but his body is pressed against something warm, or most of it is – one arm is still gripping tight to Dolores, he realises when he peels an eye open to look around. It is dark and blurry, and the few lights he sees are swaying in a way that makes him feel sick.

“-waking up.” He realises he’s being carried when he hears a deep voice above his head. He frowns, curling his fingers tighter as he tries to lift his head, see who is carrying him. He cranes his neck to look up past the large shoulders and sees a face he barely recognises.

“-if you vomit on me...”

He belches as he stares upwards, wide-eyed. It's One – he's being carried by One. But how, just last week he-

“-buried you. World went bye-bye,” he slurs, arm going slack as he tries to process what is happening. He sniffs. “Gone, s’all gone.”

“Buried us?” says a new voice. He frowns, trying to turn his head, trying to bring the world into focus as another face looms in front of him.

“-Two?”

“What do you mean, the world’s gone?” says One again. Five slumps, it is too much effort to hold himself up.

“The apocalypse is coming,” he giggle-sobs. This isn’t real, he decides. “You die, he dies, everybody dies.”

“Wait-”

“-what?”

He opens his mouth to answer, but loses the battle with his stomach, heaving over One’s arm, throat stinging as the vomit comes back up. He sobs as he settles back into the warm cradle, eyes closing.

“-that’s disgusting.”

He whimpers as he is jostled roughly by a hand on his arm. He opens his eyes to peer at Two. “No, Five, wake up. What did you mean, we die?”

“April fools… All dead. Knew it was you ‘cos…” he slurs, swinging his arm in an attempt to point at where Two’s umbrella tattoo would be. “Buried you all, in t’Glade.”

His nose begins running, along with the tears that are escaping down his cheeks. “Couldn’t lift you. Two older me’s had to come back and help,” he sniffs.

Whatever response they give to that he doesn’t hear, their raised voices drowned out by the clench in his stomach and rush in his ears as the world swirls.

***

When the world stops blurring, he finds he is crumpled on the ground next to Dolores’ trailer in the dark. He can just about see Dolores looking concerned from where she is safe in her usual seat. His knee collides with something plastic and he look down with a sniff to find a large bottle of clear water he definitely doesn’t remember scavenging earlier that day. He curls up around it with a sob, uncaring that he is cold and naked in the dirt with rocks digging into his side, crying and moaning as he drifts back to sleep.

He wishes that it had been real. He wishes he could warn his siblings.


	2. Chapter 2

**April 2019. Five is 13 (and 40 something)**

Something happens to him in his forties, Five decides as he licks the teaspoon clean. His mouth is dry, but his stomach is pleased by the small ration of calories.

He is hoping that it is a sign he will get out of hell.

He also tries not to think how many years away it means his escape is.

His eyes roam over his older self’s neatly trimmed beard, and even haircut, barely listening as his older self talks about the things they have found. It is only his third week in the apocalypse, and his palms sweat, and his already wheezy breath gets short whenever he fails to avoid the thoughts of being stuck here for anything longer than can be considered ‘temporary’.

He can’t decide if his displacements are a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, he knows he _is_ going to survive, and that very possibly he gets to go home to his family. On the other, it is a cruel warning that he is going to be here for a long, long time.

“Peanut butter,” his older self says, nodding to the small jar of heaven in Five’s hands. “-Is our best friend. Lots of calories, a helping of iron,” He chuckles. “Low moisture, and high fat, it’s the self-preserving food for the end of the world.”

Oh, and that.

Five has been visited by older versions of himself more in the last three weeks than he had been in the last two years. They usually seem to be in their thirties, best he can guess, with well-worn faces, long hair and thick beards. They’ve kept him company, but more importantly they’ve kept him _alive_ , teaching him how to determine what food is safe to eat, how to read the tumultuous weather _(‘the patterns settle down eventually, but shits rough for the first few years’)_ and how to scavenge.

Their father Reginald may have tried to instil survival skills in them, but nobody could have foreseen these very specific types of circumstances, let alone have actually trained for them.

“You’ll want to save the rest of that,” his older self says, as Five goes to take another spoonful. He looks down at the small jar, where he has barely eaten a quarter. His stomach doesn’t quite agree with the idea. He defiantly takes another heaped spoonful and lifts his chin as he puts it into his mouth, challenging his older self to say something. His mouth is drier than a desert (and it feels like he is going to be sucking peanut butter from his gums for hours), but it’s so, so worth it.

Five barely catches the end of the muttered response, “-such a little shit”. With a smug grin, he reluctantly screws the lid back on to the jar and places it carefully into the bag he had found to carry his loot.

“So, how do we get out of hell?” he questions, giving the spoon another lick to make sure he has definitely got all the peanut butter off.

“I can’t tell you.”

Five frowns. “Bullshit!”

“I can’t. We can’t warn ourselves about the future.” His face is easier to read with the hair trimmed away, Five thinks. He looks almost pained as he says it.

“You told me just last week to avoid eating the-”

“That’s different. We remember being told that, so we can warn ourselves about it.”

“So, what, we have no free will? I’ll never know if I could have eaten it, because _you_ came back and told me not too?” Five says angrily. He had been so hungry, but he had trusted the older Five who prevented him eating it, believed him when he said it would make him as sick as he’d been the week before when he’d drank dirty water. But that Five hadn’t even learnt that from experience?

Older Five is massaging his temples. “You’ll learn.”

“Oh, will I?” Five spits as he begins to pace. “If _I_ go back, I’ll _choose_ to warn myself – what’s the point of all this displacing if I can’t improve things?”

“It doesn’t work like-”

“I’ll make it work like that!” Five screams, spinning to jab a finger at his older self. “I’m in this hell hole because of _you!_ My older self didn’t warn me – well guess what? Soon _I’ll_ be the older self and I sure as shit won’t let my younger self make the same mistakes that I did!”

He leans over, bracing his hands on his knees and coughing fiercely. His lungs protesting against the shouting, trying to hack up the ash and dust he has breathed in over the past few weeks. There was only so much his makeshift masks could do, when the air was thick with it.

When he finally straightens up again, eyes watering, his older self is gone.

“Shit,” he rasps, trying to blink away the tears he can’t afford. “Shit!” He stamps his foot until he is sure he’s not going to cry, and then begins to gather up the items he can carry.

His older self had appeared just as he was about to leave the building and had helped him to lift the collapsed wall off the entrance to the basement. The basement had been a something of a jackpot – untouched by the fires and evidently belonging to somebody who enjoyed the outdoors. In the dim light he had found two rucksacks, one ready packed with a bedroll and sleeping bag, a wind-up flashlight (that worked!), an empty water canteen, a freshly stocked first aid kit and some trail mix. When he had found the peanut butter, he had sat down on the stairs and declared it time to eat, using a spoon he’d stolen from their kitchen earlier.

“I _will_ change it,” he mutters angrily as he ties the laces together of the sturdy hiking boots and secures them to the bag straps. He heads back to the box where he had found the peanut butter -which is full of what appears to be the previous owner’s favourite hiking snacks - and fills the spare pack with the packets of jerky, trail mix, dried fruit and a second jar of unopened peanut butter.

It’s time to get this back to camp, he decides, and starts to carry stuff to the trailer he left outside the building. He uses the rope he found to secure the bags on top of the other items he had found earlier, and then finds himself staring at the spot where Dolores usually sits and wishing he had brought her with him. Maybe he should bring her along when he goes out in future - she could have talked sense into older Five.

He doesn’t care what older Five says. He _is_ going to find a way to change it.

That night he dreams he is standing on the street watching his younger self run away from the academy.

And no matter how hard he tries, he cannot force the words out to stop him.

* * *

**October 2019. Five is 13.**

Six months after jumping into hell and Five has begun to find a routine. He has managed to find a map of the city for one, and whilst the landmarks are different (read: circling a multi-storey carpark he recognises that has only partially collapsed, rather than navigating by an Icarus Theatre or Bridge Street), it is still useful enough to give him zones he can mark off as already scavenged or potential for alternative shelters.

Clear days are for scouting, trying to gather as much food as he can to take back to his base camp. Storm days? Well, when the winds come they lift the ash into the air making visibility so poor he doesn’t dare leave the shelter he is living in. Storm days are for rationing matches and candlelight to start figuring out the equations he needs to get home.

Sometime in his second month in hell, he found a stash of mostly unused notebooks. He had been rummaging around what he now guesses was the burnt down remains of a school, when he came across a set of metal lockers. They had been heavily scorched and were covered in a thick layer of ash, but when he’d managed to pry them open he’d found the contents inside largely untouched by the flames, with fossilised apples, stale gym clothes and textbooks all intact inside. He had taken the most advanced maths and physics books he could find, and every pen, pencil, and notebook he could get his hands on.

And then he had started calculating.

The first thing he needed to do, he had decided, was to figure out what went wrong when he jumped _forward_. He had been certain his calculations were correct when he had first attempted to time travel and succeeded, but the more time that had passed and he had been unable to harness that same energy to jump back, the more he began to doubt them. The jumps themselves had been straightforward, so it wasn’t a matter of skill, and whilst the energy toll had been greater than a spatial jump, it hadn’t _entirely_ wiped his reserves out.

So, retracing his steps seemed the logical starting point.

Except even now, after four months of calculating, getting stuck and doing some more calculations, checking, and then redoing it all again, he still couldn’t finish the equations. His original calculations had been based on published theories, with modelled constants and calculable variables that his older self had carefully steered him towards. At the very least he’d had a calculator and hadn’t had to do everything long hand like he does now. He could remember the outline of what he had done, the logic he had followed.

But he had never expected to need to memorise every single variable because he would need to back-calculate his way out of a world where his textbooks had been obliterated.

So, for now, his notebooks languished in the corner of his shelter as a bitter reminder of his failures. He had picked over the rubble of the academy as much as he could, but very little had survived whatever force had destroyed it, or the fires that came after. His original textbooks and notes were gone. Until he has the chance to check if any of the college libraries survived, there is not much else he can do. Five hadn’t paid much attention to the outside world beyond their missions, but from reading his map he thinks there may have been three college libraries in the city.

Unfortunately, Five needs shelter more than he needs to find books right now. The air has been getting cooler in the last two weeks, and he never ventures out now without his leather jacket and scarf. Winter is coming, and his current base is too exposed, the makeshift roof is already on its last legs and there is no way to trap the warmth of a fire, or even keep out the wind.

If he can’t find anything suitable, he’s going to have to go back to the basement with the peanut butter pantry. He had carefully marked it with a star on his map so he could find it again, but it’s not ideal. The house above it no longer stands to protect it from the rain, and if the rubble slipped, it could cover the door and block his exit. There is also no light.

He would really, _really_ prefer something above ground, he thinks as he folds his map away. He is starting to get desperate, but he has yet to find a house still standing. There is some hope - the further out he scouts the more likely he thinks he is to find things that are damaged rather than obliterated, ideally some buildings with their walls still standing.

Five sighs as he carefully puts the map away into a protective sleeve, shivering when a gust of wind rattles though the shelter. He looks across at Dolores.

“Maybe I should get your coat for you,” he says, before heading over to the bags he has stuffed with all the useful clothes he can find. “…and maybe something warmer for me too.”

***

At first, Five thinks it’s a dream. He had curled up to sleep under the watchful eye of Dolores, wearing a warm jacket and tucked into the sleeping bag which was starting to look like it had seen better days. It wouldn’t be the first time that the cold, or something from his day had crept into his dreams.

However, when he begins to shiver so hard his teeth chatter and he discovers his complete lack of layers, he realises he has displaced instead. He groans as he wedges his ice-cold fingers into his armpits and looks up at the light snow falling. The novelty of seeing crisp, clean white flakes that melt on his skin, rather than the thick, grey filth of ash is lost to the pressing cold.

“Sh-shhhhiiit!” He is in an alleyway somewhere, full of dark shadows and the echo of traffic from the street. He starts to creep towards the light, trying to stay in the shadows so none of the passers-by happen to look down the alley way and see a naked teenager.

A shivering, thin and exhausted naked teenager at that.

“Wait, what- _Five?_ ” Five spins towards the voice that comes from beside the dumpster, wincing at the cruel bite of snow and grit on his bare toes.

“Shit, it is! It’s little Five.” A pale laughing face leans forwards out of the gloom, puffing merrily on a glowing cigarette. Five leans back. “Hey, no wait. It’s me, -shut up!- it’s Kl-Uh, Four.”

Five stares at him, hands returning to the small warmth in his armpits. His eyes track the ‘hello’ tattoo being waved at him. If it _is_ Four then he looks… rough. The sort of rough Five thinks he himself would look if his clothes travelled with him – with the dry skin and unkempt greasy hair, and a general tattered and run-down appearance.

Still, Five wagers that he probably _smells_ the worst of the two of them.

A coat drops around his shoulders. Five startles, looking up at Four who is frowning at him, cigarette gripped tightly in pinched lips. He reaches up to grasp the coat with one hand, feeding a shivering arm down the sleeve. The faux fur trim and sheepskin lining have seen better days, stained and murky, but it covers him to his knees and helps him to trap a meagre amount of body heat. When he turns up the collar it smells strongly of smoke.

“F-four?” he whispers, eyes locked on the now bared forearm with the familiar, if faded, umbrella tattoo.

“Hey buddy.”

“What year is it?” His teeth chatter. He marches on the spot, trying to fight off the sharp tingling in his feet.

“2015, very shortly to be 2016! That’s why we- _I_ was out here actually. Happy new year and all that!” Four giggles, eyes flicking from Five to the space next to him. When Five turns curiously, there’s nothing there.

“D-do you have anywhere warmer we could go?”

“Uh well, about that…”

***

“Why do you smoke that?” Five asks, wrinkling his nose at the sweet-stale smelling smoke that sits heavy in the room. He has stopped shivering at last, wearing a pair of Four’s sleep pants and wrapped in the bed quilt as he huddles against the headboard. Four has taken his coat back, and is perched on the end of the bed, tapping the ash into an old umbrella academy mug.

They are in Four’s room at the academy. Turns out they were only a couple of streets away, and Four had ushered him up the fire escape and jimmied open his window which an ease that belied plenty of experience. The only light is the string of fairy lights above the bed, giving a soft hazy glow on the yellow walls. They have to keep their voices low, Four has warned him, so nobody realises they have broken in.

Five wonders how many of his siblings are still at home at 26.

“Hmmm? Oh, the weed?” he sighs contentedly as he takes another lazy pull. “It… keeps me mellow y’know? Stops the nasties from screaming down my ear all night long.”

“Oh.” Five strokes the edges of the quilt, flexing his toes as the feeling slowly returns to them. He’s not quite sure he understands Four’s reasons, but considering he’s trying very, very hard not to burst into tears at seeing his brother alive again, he’s not getting too hung up on that.

“I’m scared it’s going to snow soon,” Five whispers.

Four tilts his head with a frown. “But it’s already snowing?” Five stays silent. “Unless… you mean when you came from?”

“Winter is coming, and I’m not ready.” Five studies his fingers as they pluck at a loose thread on the quilt. The inside of his elbow knocks against his side, where if he wanted he could count his ribs with the lightest of touches.

“Wait, Five… what do you mean you’re not ready? Isn’t that somebody else’s-?”

“I’m stuck in the future, on my own.” Five glances up quickly, Four is staring at him wide eyed, absent-mindedly stubbing out his rollup in the mug. “There’s no one to help. I don’t know what to do.”

“Shit,” Four breathes. “Well… socks first. Always make sure you have warm dry socks to change into-”

Five looks up. Is Four… giving him advice?

“-and a good coat. Doesn’t need to be waterproof, just warm, if you can get something that is waterproof to sleep under-”

He is. Four is actually giving him the survival advice that their father’s favourite Herr Carlson records did not. Five feels a warmth in his belly, and tries his best to listen carefully. 

Maybe, with Four’s help, he can be ready for the coming winter after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the reaction to the first chapter, I hope you have enjoyed chapter two just as much!
> 
> So what are we thinking? Do we like? Any theories forming?
> 
> Hopefully this starts to introduce a bit of how Five sees his displacement problem, and hints a bit more at his complicated relationship with himself. I personally think poor Five needs a hug. Also, big brother Klaus to the rescue, yay for Klaus! 
> 
> Also the bit about the peanut butter being the "food for the end of the world" came from something I saw on TV recently - they literally called it that and then demonstrated why with the lack of moisture in it, and my brain went 'I must get this into the fic somehow!'.
> 
> * * *
> 
> I'm going to add a fic recommendation to each chapter, to try to share a selection of my TUA favourites with you all, so here is this weeks recommendation:
> 
> [My Job Is To Take Care Of You by michals](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26802208)  
>  **Summary:** Luther avoids the apocalypse, now he needs to make sure he and Five survive the aftermath. 
> 
> A feels-full take on Luther being the sibling that survives with Five in the apocalypse. This fic does not have the amount of hits or kudos it deserves – please go fix that. :)


	3. Chapter 3

**May 1996. Four is 6, Five is 8 (and a half)**

Four was just minding his own business and playing in the courtyard when he first found out about Five’s peculiar habit of falling through time. It was a beautiful, warm day in late spring, and he was taking advantage of one of the small slivers of scheduled free time to play explorers. Playing explorers involved lots of Four’s favourite things to do when he had no siblings to play with - running around the greenhouses, chasing the pink and white blossoms floating in the breeze and watching insects using the magnifying glass he had, uh, _borrowed_ from Number One’s room earlier that day.

Today’s adventure involved following the ants – because of course the ants know where the treasure would be buried, and all he had to do was follow the clues they could lead him to. Or are the ants themselves the clue? He’s not sure yet, that’s why he has to watch them closely.

He is just leaning forward on his knees to better look at an ant, when a heavy weight collides with his back. He goes sprawling into the dirt with an _oof!_ , the magnifying glass bouncing out of his hands and into the long grass, clinking merrily as it goes. His chin bounces off the ground and pain explodes in his tongue as he catches it between his teeth.

“Owwwwwww,” he whines, curling his sore tongue up safely out of the way of his teeth, and struggling to blink back the tears at the sharp stinging pain. He pushes himself off the ground and climbs back to his feet, lifting a hand to rub gently at his sore chin and turning to look at just what had knocked him over.

It turns out it is not a _what_ that hit him, but a who. And the _who_ is a boy, with pale skin and short dark hair cut just like Four’s, one of his hands cupped around his grazed elbow as he stands up. He’s taller than Four, and isn’t wearing any clothes, but it’s weird because he looks a bit like-

“…Five?” he says warily.

The boy looks up from inspecting his elbow with something approaching a smile. “Oh, Four! Good. What year is it?” He doesn’t say sorry for knocking him over, Four notices. Funnily enough, that just convinces him even more that it _is_ Five.

“What?” he asks, confused.

“What year is it? How old are you?” Five asks again.

“…We’re six…Why do you want to know?” he asks, before thinking about it. He seems confused and he did just fall over so- “Did you hit your head and forget stuff? Should I get Mom?” Mom always asks them questions like this when they hit their head in training.

“-What? No! I don’t need Mom.” The boy scowls. “Why would you ask that, haven’t you seen me before?”

“Of course I have, you’re my brother. I see you every day.” He is still not convinced Five hasn’t hit his head. “I saw you at training this morning, and then again at breakfast!”

“No that’s not what I-” the boy sighs and rolls his eyes. “Look I’m not six years old. I’m much older than you. I’m just over eight _and a half_.”

The half seems to be very important to him, Four thinks.

“No, you’re not, we’re the same age!” Four protests.

“I am! Was I this tall this morning?” Five retorts, stepping closer and gesturing to demonstrate how the tip of his nose is now level with the top of Four’s head. Four glances down to check he isn’t cheating and standing on his tip toes.

He’s not.

“…No…” Four says reluctantly, looking up again at the hand hovering above his head. Because Five is right, he _wasn’t_ this tall at breakfast. They had stood in line together for morning inspection like they always did, and their shoulders had been exactly the same height as they knocked into in each other, trying to make the other one laugh when their father wasn’t looking.

“That’s right, I wasn’t. It’s because I’m older than you. I’ve come from the future.”

The future? “Are there flying cars?” he asks excitedly. He would love to ride in a flying car, it would be just like the comics Pogo had given them to read last week.

“Err… no.” Five frowns at him.

“Oh.” Four pouts. They stand in silence for a minute, Five seeming quite content to stand in the patch of warm sunlight whilst Four tugs nervously at his uniform sleeve. “Prove it then!” he blurts.

“Pardon?”

“Prove you are from the future!”

Five scowls. “How do I do that? I’m older than you, and I’m taller than you, isn’t that proof enough?”

“Nope. Tell me a secret! Tell me something you could only know if you are _really_ from the future!”

Five pauses, frowns, and thinks for a minute. “Has Six found his power yet?” he eventually asks.

Four shakes his head. “No.”

“Does he have tummy ache yet?”

“You know he does, he wouldn’t eat his breakfast this morning,” Four complains. They had all had to sit there in silence and wait for Six to finish his oatmeal, not allowed to leave until the whole team was ready. Five was there too - this isn’t proof!

Five nods. “Okay, I’ll tell you something nobody else knows, but you _have_ to keep it a secret. Promise?” Four nods eagerly. He is good at keeping secrets! “Okay, so Six is going to find out his power really soon.”

Four gasps. “Really? What is it? Tell me!”

Five leans forward and cups a hand around Four’s ear to whisper. “Six has got monsters in his tummy.”

“He has WHAT?” Four shrieks. He turns, about to call Five a liar when Five just… vanishes. No blue around his hands, none of the _bamf_ -y noises he usually makes when he jumps. He is just….gone. Four pouts and stomps his feet, because it’s not fair, _stupid Five and his stupid jumps_ , before giving up and crawling across the grass to try and find Number One’s magnifying glass. One will be so mad at him if he loses it…

Later, after supper, Four makes sure to stand next to Five and compare their height when Five isn’t looking. They are exactly the same, just as they were that morning at inspection. Confused, he asks Five how he made himself taller for the afternoon without wearing shoes, but Five tells him to ‘stop being crazy, it’s not possible’. So then he asks why Five pretended to be older than him, because if he’d wanted to lead in the treasure hunting adventure he could have just asked, rather than make things up.

Five just gets grumpy instead and tells him he has no idea what he is on about, and to stop telling lies. Then he jumps away. Four huffs, stamps his foot in a tantrum and shouts up the stairs that he won’t play with him _ever_ again, even though he’s not sure where Five jumped too (and he absolutely will play with him again, and Five knows it too).

But a week later Four sits in shock, watching all of their breakfasts go crashing off the table and onto the floor as tentacles burst out of Six’s stomach.

 _Six really does have monsters in his tummy_!

* * *

**January 2006. Klaus is 16, Five is 11.**

Klaus giggles as he does up the fly of his trousers, looking across at the spectre of Ben, who is leaning against the trunk of their father’s car. Ben is grinning and laughing in that sort of sharp and startled way he does when he is surprised. Klaus claps his hands and knocks the gas tank flap shut with his hip, giving Ben a celebratory twirl in delight.

“I can’t believe you actually did it!” Ben says, pushing off the car and standing up straight, shoving his hands deep into his hoody pockets. Klaus isn’t sure why Ben still protects his hands – it’s not like the lucky bastard can feel how cold the snow is anymore. _(Don’t think about why, don’t think about why…._ )

Klaus is just about to respond that _of course_ he did it, when he catches sight of a familiar figure hunched against the academy wall. He closes his mouth again, turning to look properly at the boy who is shivering violently, and wedging their hands firmly into their armpits in an attempt to keep them warm.

He’d know that figure anywhere.

“Five?” Klaus says gently.

Five flinches and gasps as Klaus steps towards him, huddling further into the wall and staring wide eyed at him. He looks terrified, Klaus thinks, as he raises his hands slowly, palms facing out towards Five to try and signal he means no harm. He remembers Five telling him how he hadn’t really left the academy in his displacements until after they started doing missions. Ben is having what sounds like a minor freak out behind him, but Klaus tells himself firmly to block that out – he can catch Ben up later once Five is gone again.

“Hey, Five it’s me. It’s your brother, Four,” he says, only just remembering in time to say his number instead of his name.

“P-prove it!” Five says, teeth chattering violently. Klaus frowns and shrugs off his academy blazer, holding it out as far over to Five as he can without stepping any closer. Five steps forward, every line of his body tense as if he’s ready to jump away at a second’s notice, and snatches the blazer out of his hands, slipping it on quickly and running his fingers over the academy crest.

“This doesn’t prove anything,” he says with a frown, which is so cute on his softer and younger face that Klaus has to be _very_ careful not to coo aloud. “You could have stolen this.”

“Your tattoo,” Ben says suddenly from over Klaus’ shoulder, making him jump in surprise. Five’s eyes narrow. “Show him your umbrella tattoo Klaus!”

“Oh,” Klaus breathes. “Good idea.” He rolls up his left shirtsleeve to the elbow and bares his umbrella tattoo for young Five to see. “Ta-dah! One bona fide Umbrella sibling for you Five-y.”

“Is that supposed to prove something?” Five says. Klaus’ eyes flick down to Five’s bare wrist. Oh shit, looks like he’s misjudged it, this Five isn’t quite old enough to have been sat down and branded like Dad’s prized cattle.

“Err-Not yet I guess,” Klaus says, wracking his brains for something else he can use to prove who he is. “Oh! I know. The first time you displaced to me, uh, the first time from my point of view I mean – _stupid timelines, they never line up_ \- you told me a secret, do you remember?”

Five nods slowly.

“Yeah! Yeah. So you told me about how B-Six had ‘monsters in his tummy’, _before_ we all found out what they were at that spectacular breakfast show!” He ignores how Ben splutters down his ear in shock. Hmm, yeah, looks like he’s going to be explaining a lot more than just his new ghost-hood to Ben later.

Like ‘hey, surprise! So our brother has been time travelling since we were little kids and we never told you, because it was our cute little secret. Oops, my bad?’

Ben is going to be sooooooo pissed with him.

“Oh. Yeah.” Five relaxes. “Okay. Can we go inside then, Four? I’m freezing!”

 _Shit. No, no, no, no, no._ Klaus panics. He can’t take Five inside - Five can’t know about what happened to Ben. Five can _never_ find out about Ben. Their siblings are probably all in their rooms crying after Ben’s funeral, and he cannot leave him in the courtyard with Ben’s casket. _Think fast Klaus, think fast-_

“Why don’t we go to Griddys?” he says quickly, trying to sound enthusiastic. Griddy’s will be perfect, there’s food, and it is away from the house and-

Five’s nose wrinkles. “What’s Griddy’s?”

“ _What?_ You haven’t been to Griddy’s yet? We are fixing that right now. They do the best doughnuts in town,” Klaus says, clapping his hands and bouncing on his feet. “Yep, that’s decided, we’re going to Griddy’s.”

He ignores Ben’s faint- “How is this possible? I think I need to sit down…” - and heads towards the fire escape, starting to climb up the ladder. He pauses halfway up to call down to Five.

“Jump up to the top but don’t go in my room or your room – Dad’s got the camera’s on again,” he lies.

He is not actually sure if that is the case, but he shares walls with Diego and Vanya and he doesn’t think their grief-fuelled sobbing (or knife throwing in Diego’s case) are going to be quiet enough for Five to not notice if he comes inside. And Five is quick, even when he’s young. He would pick up that something is wrong, would notice that his own room, with its layers of dust and the stripped bed, hasn’t been used in a long time.

Five doesn’t respond, just disappears in a whirl of blue to teeter on the platform outside Klaus’ window, peering down at him as he climbs the flight of stairs the hard way. Klaus shuffles past him and lifts the sash so he can climb through the window, ducking down next to his bed and pulling out a duffel bag stuffed at the back next to the wall. He sets it under the window and unzips it, pulling out various clothes of different sizes, holding them up to judge the size and handing the better options out through the window for Five to get changed into. The uniform trousers he’d kept are a little long so Five has to turn the bottoms up, but luckily one of the pairs of dress shoes fit well enough, and the warm coat covers the sweater vest that’s probably more than an inch too short if they are being honest.

Five hands Klaus his blazer back through the window, his fingers still cold and red where they brush against Klaus’, but no longer trembling at least. Klaus takes it back and pulls it on as he crosses his room to get his own coat and scarf from where they hang on the back of the door.

He offers Five the scarf before climbing back out of the window and chivvying Five back down the fire escape to where Ben is still waiting in the alleyway, looking no less freaked out than before but at least being freaked out _quietly_ now.

“So! Now we just need to get some money to _buy_ doughnuts. Now, tell me dear Five, have you learnt the art of pick pocketing yet…”

***

An hour or so later and they are sat triumphantly in a booth at Griddy’s, watching the snow fall outside the window and rubbing their hands together to get some warmth back in to their fingers. Klaus is delighted with his protégé - Five has taken to lifting wallets like the little sneak Klaus has always known he really is.

Okay, so it probably helped that he could cheat and blink away the second his fingers wrapped around the prize if the target was about to notice him. But! They had enough money to buy doughnuts and hot chocolate, which is what really matters here.

And, just like when an older Five had taught this to Klaus last year, everybody got their wallet back. They even gotten most of their cash back too. Klaus had rifled through the wallets Five lifted, taking a few bucks here, a couple more there, and then sending Five to trot after their victims with a wide-eyed “Sir! Sir! I think you dropped your wallet…” routine. One businessman had even handed Five a ten-dollar bill as a reward.

So Ben could quit with his disapproving looks and judge-y commentary, please and thank you.

“My head hurts,” Ben says faintly from where he sits next to Five, having finally regained control of his gaping jaw somewhere along the way. “I mean – we’ve just introduced him to Griddy’s. He has never been here before and he’s what, 10? 11? Soon he’s going to round us all up and suggest _our_ first trip to Griddy’s... which he only knows about because you showed him, and we only know about because he showed us.” Ben looks ready to cry as he whispers, “I’m so confused.”

Oh yes, the good ol’ existential time-y wime-y crisis. Klaus knows thee well.

“Here you go boys! Two hot chocolates, with all the toppings,” the waitress sing-songs as she appears at the end of the table and hands Klaus and Five a steaming mug each, both topped with a mountain of whipped cream and miniature marshmallows. “And I’ll be right back with your doughnuts and eclairs.”

“Thank you!” Klaus and Five chorus, mirroring each other as they greedily wrap their hands around the warm mugs and begin slurping noisily at the cream.

Ben’s face is a picture. “Eurgh, you are both the same,” he says disgustedly. “It’s so obvious watching you now, I don’t know how we didn’t know before that-” Klaus shushes him, forgetting for a moment that it doesn’t matter _what_ Ben says, Five won’t hear him, then hastily tries to disguise the hissing as blowing on his hot chocolate when Five gives him a funny look.

“Smooth,” Ben deadpans. Klaus quickly flashes him the middle finger whilst Five is looking down at his drink.

“This has been fun,” Five says, smiling down at his hot chocolate. Klaus wishes desperately that he had a camera to capture the moment - Five’s top lip is decorated with a moustache of cream and he just looks so _happy_.

There’s not enough happiness in their family. Especially right now.

Klaus’ smile wobbles as he glances between Five and Ben sat on the opposite side of the booth. Ben is smiling so softly at Five, like he is a little miracle. Which is fair, Klaus reckons, because his own heart is hurting right now, and he can’t decide if it’s a good ache or a sad one. Here are his two brothers, brothers who should both be lost to him through their own misadventure or violent death, yet through whatever tangles of fate gave them all their powers can still be here with him to share this moment. He clears his throat of the sudden lump he can feel there.

“Yeah buddy, it’s been the best.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this serving of younger Five, Klaus and Ben! Let me know what you thought – do we like seeing the sibling interaction and the glimpses back to their childhood? Anything you particularly like and want to see more of in the fic (or is there anything that’s not really adding any value for you?). 
> 
> This fic is about 37k into its first draft right now, but is nowhere near done (I’m going to hesitantly guestimate ~60k for a final length?) and I will definitely try to take your feedback onboard as I continue to write and edit it, as I do want it to be the best story it can be.
> 
> Also I’m considering updating the summary, as the more time passes the less I like it. Any suggestions on a better text-grab or details I should include in the summary that would have caught your attention/reflected the fic better? Also, any tagging suggestions? I’m just updating them as I go so I don’t spoil things for people reading along with the updates, but have I missed any relevant tags?
> 
> Once again thank you so much for reading, and for the lovely comments on the previous chapter (I didn’t realise how much they mean until I started writing myself). They are so encouraging, and really motivational when trying to work through writing the more stubborn scenes. Waking up or getting home from work to a comment really does make my day!  
> Best of luck to anybody partaking in NaNoWriMo!
> 
> * * *
> 
> I hope you enjoyed last week’s fic rec (let me know if you did!). This week’s TUA recommendation is:
> 
> [ out of the dead land by tomorrowsrain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26462494)  
>  **Summary:** When attempting to time travel at thirteen, Five manages to land himself at the end of a different world than his own. Meanwhile, Klaus has been surviving alone, barely holding the grief and ghosts and monsters at bay. He didn't expect to be suddenly met with a thirteen-year-old version of the brother he buried years ago, but whatever, he's adaptable. And he's going to keep Five alive until he can get back to his own universe. Whatever it takes. (Or: Klaus and Five versus a zombie apocalypse.)
> 
> So, if you follow the recently updated fics you are probably aware of this WIP, but let me rec it anyway for those that don’t. It is basically Klaus and Five vs. the zombie apocalyptic world for the win. It has ups, downs, and angsty feels galore. It’s technically a fusion-AU but you only need to be familiar with TUA to enjoy this fic, as tomorrowsrain does a great job of weaving in the information you need to know to follow the story without info-dumping.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick content warning for this chapter – there is a part of the scene which shows Five having a bit of an unhealthy relationship with food. It could be perceived as binge eating, and Five calls himself a freak internally, but this is in the context of a Five surviving on rations suddenly being confronted with a fully stocked kitchen of fresh food and not wanting to let on to his brother he is actually starving. 
> 
> If you want to avoid it, I recommend skipping from the paragraph ending “No effort required, no careful decisions on what to eat before it spoils, and what to ration for another day” to the paragraph beginning “He is hungry damn it,”
> 
> Full notes at the bottom :)

**October 2003. Five is 14.**

“Shit!”

Five curses, glaring at the chair into which he has just stumbled. His shin aches something fierce. He hadn’t been prepared to displace, disappearing whilst throwing his whole weight into pulling his trailer over the uneven ground. It was hard going, the trailer heavy after the successful plunder of a well-stocked pantry.

When he glances up, he immediately recognises the warm yellow walls of Four’s bedroom and shakes his head with a sigh. He has tried to train Four to keep his space tidy so Five would have a clear landing spot (whether the jump was intentional or not), but he has yet to succeed.

He will probably never succeed, he thinks glumly.

Despite all of that, the space is comforting; the familiar small box room with the cut off corner, the faint scent of weed that hangs heavy in the air, academy bedsheets and the soft glow of fairy lights strung above the bed and desk. Five feels a longing ache deep in his chest, and a yawning chasm of homesickness in his belly.

He reaches out to trail his fingers lightly over the edge of the desk. The desk itself is as messy as ever, strewn with loose sheets of work, the margins liberally decorated with doodles and messy sketches. A translation of a Latin passage sits in the only clear space, evidently the most recent piece that was worked on. He is just scanning the book titles – ‘Communicating with the departed’ makes some sense but since when had Four studied ‘ _Basic theories of time travel’?_ – when the rumpled bed quilt moves, lifting to reveal his brother’s pale tear-strewn face.

“Four,” Five whispers, eyes locking with his brothers red ones. He steps forwards to crouch next the bed and hide his nakedness from view. Whilst his brother has seen him like this many times over the years, and Five himself is long resigned to the unfortunate consequences of his involuntary time jumps, it doesn’t mean he’s entirely comfortable with just standing around in the nude whilst having a conversation. Crouching next to the bed also has the benefit of hiding most of his ribs, the hungry curve of his belly and the bite of his hipbones from his brother’s keen sight.

He might be more experienced and better at scavenging now, but he does not dare to ease up on the strict rationing regime he has set himself. Not when the storms can still trap him, huddling in his bunker for days at a time unable to search for more supplies due to the dust, or the strong winds or in the winter, the days upon days of unrelenting snow.

“What’s wrong?” He reaches a hand towards Four, but stops, leaving it hovering over the quilt, unsure what he had even meant to do with it in the first place.

He is no longer used to touch. His older selves rarely come close to him unless it is to help attend a wound, or to help him lift something. He has only displaced back to Four twice now since he had given him survival advice. It is much less than frequent than he did in childhood, and usually it was always Four that offered a comforting hand on his shoulder, a reassuring pluck of his sleeves or even a playful poke in the ribs. It had never really been Five that reached out.

“Five?” his brother sobs, looking Five up and down as if he can’t quite believe he’s really there.

Five nods, frowning as he drops his hand. Looking closer he can see Four is gripping a crumpled white shirt to his chest, the same way he had sought comfort from his stuffed toys as a child. It brings back the vague and fuzzy memories of his first displacement, back when he was very young. Four’s shirt had been long enough to cover him to his knees back then.

His eyes linger on the shirt. “Have… Have I just been here?”

“Yeah,” Four croaks, before clearing his throat. A hand creeps out from under the blankets, reaching out as if to touch Five but pausing just short of making contact. “A very little you, who informed me very seriously that he was five _and a half_.”

Four chuckles and even Five’s lips twitch at that. The half had been very important at the time.

Four sniffs. “I think I startled you? But, I came in my room and there’s this little boy stood there about to open my stash of birthday weed and I panicked! So, I snatched it off you.”

“I think I remember. I think I wondered what the smell was,” Five murmurs. He forces himself to creep his hand forward across the quilt to tangle his fingers with Four’s, and neither of them mention it even as they squeeze tight enough to turn their knuckles white, as if trying to reassure themselves that the other is real.

“Yeah? Anyway I think that was the first time you, uh, displaced?”

Five nods. “I thought it was a dream. It wasn’t until it happened again a few weeks later, and I met an older version of myself that I thought anything of it," he says, voice so low it was nearly a whisper. Then his mind catches on something Four had said. “Wait, birthday stash? What’s the date then?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, birthday stash. For tonight actually. Today’s our birthday.”

Five’s heart aches a little at that. It’s not _their_ birthday anymore. Not if you count by actual chronological time lived. They had decided between them in the past to forgive the few days out he must be from all of his displacements – it was too hard to track – but with the apocalypse? He is now months out of line at best, even disregarding the displacements.

He hums anyway. “Happy birthday. What year?”

His brother hesitates. “…2003.” Ah, so it’s after his apocalyptic jump then. That could explain the tears, it would be the first birthday they had without Five. God knows _he_ had cried and cried on the day he had designated as their birthday a few weeks ago, not quite sure of the actual date and unable to accurately track time due to his displacements and non-existent weather patterns. Still, it had _felt_ like the right time.

And what a day for little Five to turn up, if Four hasn’t seen any version of Five in the months since he ran away from the dinner table.

He tries to cheer him up. “Did Grace get you something nice?”

A pause, then Four sniffles. “She gave us names.” Five smiles - Four had never been one to keep many secrets from him when he jumped, not even potential future birthday presents.

“Names?” he checks.

“Yeah, instead of numbers.”

Five tries to imagine getting a name. He wonders if his older self knows all their names, and that was why his tongue had seemed to stumble over their numbers as he had helped Five to carry their bodies to The Glade. At the time, Five had just assumed his older selves were strangled by the same grief that he himself had been choking on, but maybe that’s not all it was

He drops his chin to rest on the arm he has folded on the bed, the other still firmly gripping Fours hand. “What name did she give you then?” he prompts.

“Klaus.”

“Klaus,” he tries it out. “I like it, it suits you.”

“Thanks. How…. How old are you?”

That’s a tricky one.

He tilts his head in a gesture to Fo- _Klaus’_ dresser. “May I?” When Klaus nods, he gently untangles his hand from Klaus’ grip and blinks over to the dresser. He knows Klaus usually keeps a stash of his old clothes for him under the bed, but today he wants something comfortable, so he pulls some of his brother’s pyjamas from the top drawer, and uses the distraction of sliding into some clothes to give himself time to think.

He focuses on buttoning the pyjama shirt. “I’m… A few weeks past fourteen, I think.”

“You-” Klaus swallows. “-you’re fourteen already, and you haven’t come back?” For the first time he seems to notice the state of Five’s face, eyes flicking from the prominent cheek bones up to the greasy hair and then back to the dirt smeared across his brow. “Why haven’t you come back?” he continues, voice small.

“Can’t. At least, not yet,” he sighs. “I _did_ manage to time travel on purpose, but I jumped too far forward and it’s… trickier… to jump back again.”

“Oh,” Klaus swallows. “Do you know if you get back soon?”

“I’m not sure. I ended up _decades_ in to the future and landed on my own,” he exaggerates, trying to pre-empt and avoid the questions about what their family is like in the future. “And I haven’t displaced to the in-between very much. I am working on the equations to get back, but it’s trickier than going forwards and I can’t find the right books to help me.”

That’s putting it mildly. So far, he’s only found one textbook that could help him and all it has done is confirm that he didn’t fuck up the calculations to jump forward, or at least that he can tell. It’s not helping him to calculate how to get back any quicker though.

“Oh,” Klaus says quietly, shrinking back into a ball under the quilt as he takes that in.

They sit in silence for a few moments. It is a comfortable sort of silence, one they have shared many times as they have drifted into their own thoughts. But Five can’t help but wish Four - _Klaus_ \- would break it, would somehow hear the empty echo of the apocalypse in every breath and speak up to banish it.

Klaus props himself up on his elbow. “Why do you always displace to me?” he asks suddenly, as if he had heard Five’s wish.

“Pardon?”

“Why do you always come to me when you displace? Why not any of our other siblings? Do you ever displace to Dad?” he says quickly, the questions seemingly flooding out now the dam has broken.

Five gapes at him. Where has this come from?

Klaus continues, waving a hand in the air. “You do only displace to me, right? You aren’t displacing to the others as well and we are stupidly all keeping it a secret from one another?”

“I…. don’t know,” Five says slowly. “I mean, no. I haven’t been with any of our siblings when I’ve displaced before…but, I don’t know _why._ ” He carefully leaves out that their father knows about his displacement problem. That’s not a can of worms he wants to open right now.

“So it _is_ just me.” Klaus seems to be rather pleased by prospect, if the smug tone in his voice and the curl of his lips is anything to go by. “Well, I simply _must_ be your favourite then.”

Five snorts. “That can’t be it, Seven is much better company and Six is much less annoying.”

Klaus pouts at him.

Five crumbles. “I suppose you are better than One and Three at least,” he concedes.

“I’m just doomed to be the middle child in every way,” Klaus sighs, raising a hand to his brow dramatically, leaning back to sprawl across his pillow and feign despair.

“You’ll survive,” Five drawls, before blinking and swallowing back the sudden lump in his throat. He coughs lightly. “How are the others? Six? Seven?”

Its Klaus’ turn to go quiet, fiddling with the shirt still bundled in his grip.

“Quiet. Sad. Today was… hard. I think Seven has been crying.”

Five draws his knees up to his chest. He’s not sure what to say.

“We miss you,” Klaus chokes, fresh tears spilling down his cheeks as he blinks rapidly. “When will you come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re from the future! Can’t you, I don’t know, ask one of us? Yourself?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Five snaps, staring at his knees. “I can ask myself until I’m blue in the face but the future me’s never tell me anything important like that.”

“Well, why not?”

“I don’t know. They say it’s to do with changing the past – it’s already happened to them, so they know they can’t tell me because they weren’t told themselves,” He sighs. “That’s what they say anyway. I’m not sure I believe them, but either way they won’t give me any answers.”

“I used to think your power was really cool,” Klaus says lowly after a moment. “I was so jealous. I’d have given anything to have your power instead of mine. Still would, I think, if it were just the jumping.” He pauses to sniff and wipe the tears away. “But the time travelling doesn’t seem as fun as it did when we were kids.”

“It’s not fun turning up places naked, no,” Five says drily, wincing as he thinks back to his freezing cold landing just a few months ago. “…But the last time I saw you, you gave me some really helpful advice, so thank you.”

He had caught a chill from that trip, spending the next few days feeling weak and shivery as he tried to find new shelter and gather the supplies Klaus had recommended for winter. Dolores had been pleased to see that he had returned more hopeful, but worried when it seemed like he was getting sick.

Speaking of supplies….

“I’m hungry – up for raiding the kitchen?”

Klaus’ eyes light up. “Yeah! I have the munchies, and I just know there are some brownies hiding in the fridge I could eat.”

They sneak out of his room and down the corridors, Five going with Klaus ‘on foot’ so to speak, unwilling to waste any energy on frivolous jumps. It is late enough that everybody should be in bed, Reginald and Pogo included, and Grace should be charging by the gallery. Still, they tread softly on socked feet and don’t even dare whisper until they are well clear of the bedroom corridors.

He is taken aback when Klaus uses an arm over his chest to stop him from going around the corner to the staircase, until Klaus silently points out a new security camera. They hover until it swivels to the opposite direction, before scurrying down the stairs with nervous giggles (Klaus) and tense shushing (Five).

When they finally arrive at the kitchen, Five has to bite his lip to prevent his suddenly wet eyes from spilling tears. Klaus makes straight for the fridge, rummaging around noisily until he finds the fore-mentioned brownies with a triumphant ‘a-ha’!

Five can barely take his eyes off the fridge itself.

A working fridge, full of fresh food (no rotten meats or mouldy cheeses, no rancid smells), just there. At his fingertips. Ready for the taking. No effort required, no careful decisions on what to eat before it spoils, and what to ration for another day.

He digs his fingers into the soft skin of his forearm, pinching hard enough to bruise. _Pull it together, before Klaus notices, you freak._ He steps up to the counter, fingers brushing lightly along the surface until he gets to the fruit bowl. The sweet smell of oranges lingers in the air like a light perfume. He plucks an apple and a banana from the bowl, tucking the apple under his arm and fumbling slightly as he tries to peel the banana’s spotted skin.

“Hey Klaus,” he says around a mouthful of sweet, sweet banana mush. “Is there any orange juice?” Klaus hums in agreement, bare toes tapping the floor as he sits at the table, savouring his brownie slice like the rare treat it was. They very rarely got any cake without having to sneak out for it.

Five moves to the fridge, pulling it open almost reverently before taking out the carton of orange juice and finding a glass, licking the remains of the banana flesh from his fingers as he goes. The apple goes between his teeth when he needs both hands to pour himself a glass, but as soon as he has a hand spare he sets to swiftly devouring it, pips and all.

When he finally sips at his orange juice, he nearly spits it back at just how tart it tastes, his taste buds long adjusted to the bland or salted tastes of canned goods that make up the bulk of his diet. The burst of fresh citrus on his tongue is like a static shock, but he eagerly goes back for more.

He can’t remember when he last had fruit. Real, fresh fruit, and not a small handful of dried apricots rationed over a fortnight, or an overly sweet can of pineapple rings eaten in two days before it can spoil.

He pours himself another glass.

When he finally settles next to Klaus at the table he has drained the second glass of orange juice, switched it out for a glass of milk, grazed his way through a handful of grapes and has a plate stacked with buttered toast and a jar of raspberry jelly to spread.

He is hungry damn it, and taking advantage of the opportunity to get vitamins, minerals and _carbs_ , and no amount of judgemental looks from Klaus are going to stop him. He also fully intends to borrow Klaus’ toothbrush after this feast, if he makes it back upstairs before he bounces back to hell.

He isn’t going to be telling Klaus about that part of his plan of course.

“Christ, you weren’t joking,” Klaus laughs. “Do I need to count my fingers before I leave the kitchen?”

“Fuck off,” Five mumbles between bites of toast, slumping in his seat. Klaus just shrugs and grins, returning the tub of brownies to the fridge, before dropping back into his chair with a hum.

When Five finally finishes his stack of toast, he barely manages to stop himself from licking the crumbs and sweet jelly smeared across his fingers. Instead, with great effort he takes his plate and knife to the sink, rinsing the crumbs away.

For the first time in a long time, his stomach hurts in a good way. A sort of mellow, satisfied and stretched feeling rather than the gnawing hunger to which he has become accustomed. 

“What now mein brother?” Klaus stretches as he stands. “Are we gonna sneak out, or-”

“A bath,” Five blurts, turning away from the counter. “I really, _really_ want a bath.”

Five cannot describe how badly he wants to scrub the dirt from between his toes, to have clean hair and not an itchy scalp.

“Oh. Well. A bath it is then!” Klaus says, leading the way out of the kitchen. “You can even use some of my bath salts… and if you are very nice to me maybe we can raid that birthday stash of mine to _really_ celebrate….”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If UK news is full of the US election, I can't imagine what the US is like right now. So enjoy another early update to distract you for a short while. I'll be keeping updates to the weekend in future - it's actually more convenient that the Monday I started with.
> 
> Once again, thank you for the love for the previous chapter, I hope you have enjoyed chapter four! Those of you that read the prologue now know where little Five went on his first displacement. Poor Klaus probably has emotional whiplash – you don’t see your runaway brother for nearly a year and then two versions of him come along one the same day!
> 
> Jelly or jam? I had to google this one and I still wasn’t sure! Jelly and jam are two very different things in the UK and of the two you’d only put jam on your toast. Jelly is for trifles, or jelly and icecream. If any Americans would like to confirm if I got it right or not that’d be great please. 
> 
> New summary is now up – what do we think (feel free to be honest, I can always rewrite it again). Thank you Caelice for your feedback on the old summary.
> 
> As always, I love kudos, bookmarks or better yet, comments! I’m friendly, I promise!
> 
> * * *
> 
> Fic rec time! This weeks recommendation is:  
> [No Future Is Perfect, But This One's Pretty Good by Shadowscast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26203318) (Link now fixed)  
>  **Summary:** Dave survives the Vietnam War and goes back to Dallas. He settles into what promises to be a long, lonely life, working at Glen Oaks Hardware by day and tinkering with circuit boards in the back room by night. Then a time-traveling woman in red boots crashes into his life, and everything changes.
> 
> This fic doesn’t have the kudos it deserves (please go fix that). Shadowscast somehow weaves both Dave and Lila into a believable post s2-2019 story with all the siblings. The characterisation is so on point, well worth a read!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the love for chapter four, both TTL and Five’s First Displacement have both officially broken the 100 kudos barrier this week <3 Also thank you for the great Jam vs Jelly insights in the comments – I loved those conversations!
> 
> As always, the bulk of the notes are at the end. Hope you enjoy this chapter!

**Spring 2021. Five is 15.**

Five pauses next to the familiar overturned and burnt-out burger van, barely sparing it a glance as he looks at the piles of rubble. He remembers when he first started scavenging, how he had gone over to look inside in the hopes of finding some leftover food or unopened drinks cans.

Instead, he had been confronted with his first burnt corpse.

The body was no larger than himself, but damaged beyond all recognition, clothes completely burned away and what skin and features were left were blackened and twisted. They had probably been a teenager helping on their parent’s van when whatever caused the apocalypse struck.

Five had lost what little was left in his stomach then, not yet hardened to the horrors he would continue to find.

Now, he quickly scans the piles of rubble and the skeleton of steel framework that still stands, checking if it is as he remembers and that the winter storms haven’t caused any further collapses. It doesn’t look too different, he decides, readjusting his rucksack and carefully picking his way through until he gets into the Glade itself.

“Hey guys.”

Five sighs, dropping his rucksack to the dusty floor in the middle of the Glade. Normally he wouldn’t be so careless with it, but it’s mostly empty these days, just a bit of rope, his favourite knife and a small bag of trail mix that will make up his ‘lunch’ for the day if he doesn’t find anything else.

He has left Dolores at home today. They had made shallow excuses about how it was cold, and she didn’t really want to go out, and about how they’d spent a lot of time together recently, what with winter locking them in. Dolores had then lightly commented about how it would be nice to have her own space for a few hours, and how some time to himself might improve his mood. A lovely little string of convenient reasons for Five to head out by himself.

In reality, they had both known where he was going today, and that he preferred to go alone.

Dolores really is too good for him.

“So… I survived another winter.” He says, lowering himself to sit cross-legged on the dirt in front of the four stone piles. _Cairns_ , he reminds himself, _they are called cairns._ “That makes two of them now...” He trails off.

What are you meant to say to the graves of your siblings, who you had to cover with bricks and rubble because you couldn’t even manage a real burial for them?

What are you meant to say, when every day is about survival, and you aren’t really _living_?

“I’m sorry.” He swallows, a lump in his throat. “I’m so sorry, I never found Six or Seven. I couldn’t bring them back here…. So we could be all together again, as a family.” He rubs roughly at his eyes, pretending they sting because of the dust and not because his heart is bleeding with grief and his chest feels like it has been hollowed out with guilt.

Because this winter he had finally come to terms with reality, and he had forced himself to give up on clinging to his desperate hope of finding them alive. There is nobody left. No signs of human life in this hell, and it has been long enough that the few corpses he does come across are no longer identifiable. He could literally find Six or Seven now and would never know it was them, unless they managed to die holding a sign declaring ‘I am Number --!’.

“So, um, I suppose I should probably tell you about Dolores.” He says, staring blankly into the space between Two and Three’s graves. “Yeah.... So… I’m not completely alone. It’s just Dolores and I but, that’s better than it being just me by myself I guess.”

How are you meant to mention your post-apocalyptic partner to your dead siblings anyway?

“I think you would like her, because she’s not afraid to sass me. Like, all the time. I think it might be because she could be a little be older than me, but she won’t tell me how old she actually is.” He sighs, fingers worrying at a loose thread in his trousers. “We found each other on my first day here, and we’ve stuck together ever since. We share everything, and I don’t think I can keep many secrets from her anymore, she knows me so well. Too well, probably.”

He pauses.

“Maybe… maybe next time I’ll bring her along. Introduce you guys.”

He sits in silence for a small while, the gusts of wind whistling around the steel framework and half-collapsed buildings the only sound as he tries to imagine how that would go, how his siblings and Dolores would get along.

 _Pointless_ , he chides himself. _Just a fantasy._

“So…I, uh….” He pauses, takes a fortifying breath, and continues. “I had a bit of a strange displacement yesterday. Landed in a side street near the academy I think, but it was nice because it was a really warm day… Anyway, I bumped into a guy, or this guy bumped into to me, I’m not sure really-”

He’d been disorientated from the displacement, one minute he’d been sleeping curled up with Dolores and the next stood he was stood naked in the middle of a street in broad daylight.

“-uh anyway, I think he knew who I was? Brown hair, roundish face, bit of beard shadow. Does he sound familiar to you?”

The man had grabbed him by the shoulders, preventing him from falling over, but had also casually stepped around Five in such a way that had stopped him from getting past and out into the street without needing to use his powers to jump around him. He had apologised for bumping into Five, and hadn’t really said anything that suspicious, but… it had been the look on his face. Five’s gut just hadn’t trusted it, he’d felt almost like he was a target.

And not just because he was a naked teenager in a quiet side street.

He hasn’t told Dolores about it yet, even though he’d been quiet when he arrived back in their bed, still tense and anxious. He was too shaken by what had happened, unable to ignore the feeling that he’d been recognised. But, he knows she has been able to tell something is off, it’s clear in the gentle way she’s spoken to him, and in her gracious way of setting up excuses for him come here alone today when they normally stuck together now.

“Anyway, so I don’t know who he was, but I looked past him just in time to see myself go running past the end of the street.” He takes a few deep breaths. “I think it was when I ran away, one of the jumps I made on the way to this hell.”

He runs his suddenly clammy hands over his trousers, focuses on his breathing for a moment. _In, hold, out, pause, repeat._

“I’m worried that…” He swallows, feeling nauseous. “What if older me _was_ right? What if I… I can’t warn myself?”

He can almost hear Klaus denying it, trying to reassure him that they do have free will.

“Yeah…yeah.” He chuckles weakly. “You’re right, I can’t think like that. It was one time! I just… bumped into a guy and I didn’t make it to the street in time. Because I didn’t know when I was and that it was important.” He swallows. “Nothing sinister about that, it was just unlucky.”

It doesn’t help much with the sick feeling in his stomach though.

“Just…unlucky.”

* * *

**Summer 2021. Five is 15.**

“Dolores, be honest, does it look straight?”

Five squints to see his reflection in the tiny compact mirror he had found, twisting to try and see the back of his head. He thinks it was part of a woman’s make up set, but isn’t really sure what the powders were for - he can’t say he had paid that much attention when Three had started borrowing and experimenting with Grace’s things before he left.

He had been searching through what had once been somebody’s bathroom, hoping to find some still sealed toothbrushes, or toothpaste, or mouthwash, or even just some floss, when he found the toiletries and makeup bags mostly intact. He had gone to get Dolores and helped her to sit on the lid of the (surprisingly intact, if no longer functional) toilet. They had found an unopened nail polish amongst the beauty items, and Five had spent ages painstakingly painting Dolores’s fingernails in a fresh blue that reminds his of his powers. He thinks that he probably should have carried on scavenging, but Dolores has put up with a lot from him recently, so she deserves a treat.

Then Five got to work on himself, reluctantly discarding the razor he found, after eyeing up a blade that was more rust than edge. He decided his small thin and itchy facial hair was better than the damage the razor would probably dole out. He had already had a tiny pair of nail clippers he had found early on in his time in hell, but in the bag were a larger pair that meant he could really trim back his toenails properly. A godsend really, because his body had decided it wanted to grow again, lack of food be damned, and his toes had been bumping uncomfortably against the end of his boots.

It still won’t solve his problem of needing to find some bigger boots, but hopefully his nails won’t be helping to rip holes in all his socks so quickly now.

The other key find had been a pair of proper haircutting scissors.

Hallelujah.

He had attempted to cut his hair before with one of his knives once it had passed his shoulders, irritated by the length and how it blew in his eyes, but also by the amount of dirt and tangles it could accumulate in a day. Dolores had tried to warn him that it was a bad idea, and she’d been right. The knife hadn’t gone sweeping through his hair, like he had imagined, but instead needed a sawing motion. That in itself would have been okay, he wouldn’t have minded the jagged ends because he wasn’t looking for fashion, just function.

Except his grip on the knife had slipped, and the next thing he knew he had been howling in pain, having sliced into his other hand instead.

The shock had been enough to displace him back to the mansion in the middle of the night. He’d landed on his sleeping eight year old self who was so out of it on medication he didn’t question Five’s unkempt appearance, just shuffled down stairs to wake up a young Klaus. They had both helped him sneak to the infirmary to stem the bleeding and clean the wound. Any normal person would have had it stitched, but Five didn’t dare, remembering the pain of displacing and leaving his stitches behind as a child. Keeping it bandaged when he returned hadn’t been too much trouble, but keeping it clean had been a bit trickier. He had spent nearly ten days trying not to panic about infection every time the wound throbbed or he opened it slightly by overusing his hand.

Needless to say he had left the half-hacked haircut alone and not tried to use a knife on it again.

But proper scissors that still had a sharp edge?

Hell yes was he sorting it out now.

He turns away from the mirror to frown at Dolores. “No, I – why would you say that, of course I’ll believe you. Why would I ask you if I wasn’t going to trust your answer?” He runs a hand down the back his head, trying to gauge if it is level across his shoulders. _Its close enough,_ he decides, _remember, function over form children!_

The same words bestowed on them by their father and later repeated by Grace as he and his brothers had all sat in line waiting for their uniform haircuts as children. They had all had the same short hair until they were 12. Apparently at that point Pogo had prevailed with their father that a small amount of permissible individual style would help with the Academy’s image and appeal to the public once they began to run missions.

Five had always secretly suspected it was all rumours.

Still, his current haircut would never have made standards even with that leeway – a boy, with his hair past his ears? Not in Sir Reginald’s household! But the shoulder length straight cut was practical – warm on his head for winter and long enough to tie back with old shoelaces or string, but not so long as to be constantly getting knotted up or in his way. There was no point cutting it short, it would only need trimming again once it started to tickle his ears.

“Well, anyway, I think this has been a good day Dolores.” Five says as he begins to repack the toiletries into his rucksack, making sure he definitely has the nail clippers and scissors. He eyes the makeup bag, and decides to slip that in too when Dolores isn’t looking. If nothing else, trying it out will be good entertainment the next time they are trapped inside because of a storm.

He eyes up the bottle of wine he found earlier and carefully cushioned at the bottom of the rucksack using his sweater.

“A very good day indeed.”

* * *

**December 2007. Five is 16, Klaus is 18.**

One minute Five is napping on the old beaten mattress he and Dolores share, wandering in dreams with wine-softened edges, the next he is landing on top of a warm body, his reactions slow and muddled with sleep.

A warm and completely naked body that tries to buck him off and shouts-

“What the fuck?!”

A warm, naked, and very sweaty body, Five realises, hands scrambling for purchase on their back even as they are trying to throw an elbow into his gut. He manages to get a grip and pushes himself away, toppling backwards off the bed in his desperation to put space between this stranger and his own naked body.

A warm, naked, sweaty stranger that is very much _not alone_ _in the bed_ , Five learns as Klaus’ face appears over the edge of the mattress, peering down at him with a flushed face and sweaty hair.

“Five? What are you- ohhhhhh, wait.” He grins down at him, pupils blown wide and a hint of slur to his words.

Five scrambles back away from the bed as the other guy stands up, still freaking out loudly at suddenly having another (uninvited) bed partner. “Klaus, you know this guy? Who the fuck is he? Where did he come from?!” He shouts, fishing around on the floor for a pair of jeans to cover up his rapidly wilting, uh, _situation._ Five can feel his own cheeks burning as he tucks his knees up, trying to preserve his own modesty.

“It’s my brother Five-yyyyy! Come to join in the fun?” Klaus waggles his eyebrows at Five, sitting up on the bed uncaring about his own lack of clothing and the smattering of little bruises around his collarbones, or his own _situation_ which is still going strong. “I mean, I thought that was more our illustrious leader’s style but y’know…”

No Five doesn’t know, and he really, _really_ doesn’t want to know either. He panics, eyes darting around the room until they land on the ajar door that leads to a darkened bathroom. He throws himself into a jump, swiftly shutting the door and sliding down to sit with his back again it, breathing quickly. In the main room he can hear Klaus’, uh, _friend_ making loud excuses to leave and telling Klaus he’s ‘one sick fucker’ to which Klaus just laughs. Beyond that, he can hear the muffled but still loud sounds of music and voices, and _just how many people are there_? He can almost feel the throb of the bass reverberating through the house.

Five clamps his hands over his ears, curls into his knees and sobs. It’s all too loud, too busy, too _much_. He doesn’t want to be here. His skin crawls where it touched the naked stranger, and his insides are cringing so hard he is surprised he isn’t choking on them.

He thinks he would almost rather be in hell than be here.

A few minutes later there is a knock on the door.

“Heyyy Five. Let me in? I’m wearing clothes, promise!” Klaus says. Five takes deep shuddering breaths, trying to banish the image and the sounds of his brother and his, uh, lover out of his mind.

His mouth tastes a little bit like sick. Why couldn’t he have at least landed _next_ to the bed, rather than end up entangled with them?

“C’mon Five, please let me in!”

Five shuffles across the floor until he is sat with his back to the bath. “It’s not locked.” He croaks. The door clicks open quietly and Klaus puts his head around the door. He is grinning, the sort of expression that says he’s about to tease Five for something or other, but his face drops when he sees Five.

“Hey. Hey. What’s wrong?” He says, stepping into the bathroom and flicking the lights on. He sits down opposite Five, pulling his knees up like a mirror image so they both fit.

Five can feel the heat in his cheeks again looking at Klaus’ dishevelled state, with his wild curls, smudged eyeliner and a hickey peeking out above his top. He looks down to stare at his knees instead. His knees are shaking, he notices distantly. There is a roaring cheer from downstairs.

“I-” He swallows, throat dry. “I… don’t want to be here.” He stammers, glancing up.

Hurt flashes across Klaus’ face. “Oh, well then...”

Shit.

Five loses control of his breathing, feels it shorten again. That’s not what he meant, he-

“Jesus, breathe Five!” Klaus is suddenly looming in his face, eyes wide. “You’re okay, that’s it…” He coaches. Five feels tears of frustration roll down his cheeks.

“I-” He gasps. “I didn’t mean it… like that!”

“Okay, okay chill, its fine.” Klaus says, patting his knee. He cocks his head as the music gets even louder and Five flinches. “…You don’t like the party?”

Five nods miserably. It’s close enough.

“Too loud?”

“Too many… people.” Five whispers, scrubbing a hand over his cheeks.

“Okay, okay. Let’s get out of here then (god knows my fun is over now...). We could go to the library – that’s where you dragged me last time anyway-” Five stares at him. “Oh, no? A later you then? Okay, well, you’re just gonna _love_ the library-” Klaus mutters to himself, standing up and brushing his trousers down. “-although just _why_ you are so obsessed with the math and physics sections I don’t know. You don’t even like math!”

Five gapes at him, but Klaus doesn’t see it as he is opening the door to the bedroom and walking over to the closet to start rummaging for clothes. Five’s ears are ringing, and he feels like he’s been hit in the head with a frying pan (and he’d know - Two did that to him once when they were younger and fighting over something stupid).

Why has he never thought about going to the library when he displaces?

All of the dead-ends in his calculations because he can’t remember the exact constants or variable expressions, and all of this time he could have been _going to a library full of textbooks!_

“Heeeere we go!” Klaus throws a pair of sweats and a hoodie at him to wear. “Not my best work, but y’know, work with what you have. Or can steal. Same difference! How big are your feet right now because shoes might be trickier…”.

Five doesn’t care. He can go barefoot, his feet are tough with callouses. Hell, he would go to the library naked if he had to.

This could be just the breakthrough he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Series 3 is officially confirmed! Whoop whoop, happy days! Now to fill the void until what…the back end of ’22?
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this chapter - Have some more sad/lonely/confused Five! I hope I did the last scene justice - in my head, certainly for this fic, Five is asexual, and may or may not be sex-repulsed (hard to tell when it's your brother's sexy times you fall into, and the rest of the time the issue just doesn't....come up... lets say). He is not aromantic though, as evidenced by his ever closer relationship with Dolores. Anyway this is sort of the first time he's been confronted with the issue of having to even consider sex as something that exists outside of a book or a sex-ed talk. Let me know how I did!
> 
> I know it seems like lots of not-quite-connected scenes right now about Five’s survival in the apocalypse/flashbacks to his childhood, but I promise it becomes more flowing once we hit s1. For now I’m trying to set the scene for how his Displacements affect Five’s survival and familial relationships. I’m also trying my hand at foreshadowing for the first time, (trying) to subtly set things up for later on. Let me know how I’m doing, and if you have any budding theories or questions so far!
> 
> Next week’s chapter is probably the one I’m most nervous about all your reactions too. I shall only say one word: conflict!
> 
> So before you go, I have a question for y’all. Tumblr? As a person in the fandom I exist only on Ao3…. Should I be on tumblr? If so, why? (reader’s and/or writer’s perspectives welcome!) What are the pros/cons? Does it take time to set up/maintain? I see lots of authors dropping their tumblr in the Author notes…
> 
> * * *
> 
> For those following the recs, I have been back and fixed the ghost links on previous chapters – they should all work now!  
> This weeks fic rec is: [Sand Timer by TheArchaeologist](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19900894)  
>  **Summary:** It is not all that surprising, really. Five has put his body through a lot over the years, from time travel and forty-five years in the apocalypse, to age regression and transporting seven people at once. It has been stretched out, worn thin, and pushed to its limit and beyond in order to get Five where he needed to go. So, it is unsurprising when it finally gives out. Luther is the one who finds him.
> 
> Five has a heart attack and we get all the shocked and grieving family feels <3 Please go break your heart over this.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the love for chapter five, I hope you enjoy chapter six!

**Late spring, 2023. Five is 17.**

Their supplies are starting to run thin.

As best as Five and Dolores can track these things, it should be approaching summer now (and by summer he means a few extra hours of hazy daylight and no snow – the warm and bright days he remembers of his childhood are a just memory now). He rarely takes his trailer out to scavenge anymore – the rucksack is easier to manage with the rough terrain and nowadays he is forced to search so far out from his base that he has to jump with the trailer if he doesn’t want to take several hours just to _get_ it to the outskirts.

And honestly? It is a very good day nowadays when he can even half fill the rucksack, let alone need the trailer.

He continues to search through the rubble. As best he can tell this used to be a residential street. He has been working his way down it all week, carefully sifting through rubble and half-standing buildings for whatever food, clothing, or even building supplies that he can find. What can’t fit in his rucksack, but he wants to keep, he will add to a pile he started on the street - he’ll make the effort in a few days to bring the trailer across and pick it all up before he moves to the next block.

Another week or two and it should be mild enough to pack up his base camp and begin to live on the road again. He is actually looking forward to it, sick of seeing the same four walls he has lived in since last fall. He had found a garage that was mostly still standing to hunker down in for the winter – only one roof panel had been ripped off so he’d had to plug the gap, and the metal door was a warped mess he couldn’t ever hope to repair or remove. Still, after using part of an old circus tent to cover the doorway it had served him well to shelter from the elements.

God, does he love that garish yellow and red diamond canvas.

When he had stumbled across it, just before the snow came this winter, he had thought he was dreaming. So much sturdy and waterproof material in once place, just when he needed to make half a roof and block off most of a wall so he didn’t freeze to death? It seemed too good to be true.

It nearly was.

Like everything about life in hell, it didn’t want to come easy. The swathes of the heavy material laid crumpled and twisted across the ground, pinned down in places by overturned trucks. It had taken two days and blunted his best knife to cut himself the large sections he needed to take back to the bunker he was preparing for winter. It had taken him another two days to actually fold and carry all the pieces back, heavy and cumbersome to get into the trailer. By the time he had fixed up his shelter a whole week had passed and he had done very little scavenging.

But when he was curled up his fortified shelter a few months later, unable to leave due to the fierce snow storms, and trying desperately to think of anything but the gnawing hunger in his belly, it was still worth the week of scavenging he lost. Worth all the recalculations and the subsequent shrinking of his daily rations.

Worth it, worth it, worth it.

Because he might have been cold, and he might have been desperately hungry, but he was dry and most importantly he was still _alive_ and able to be and feel all those things.

So, the angry and growling hunger he feels in his belly as he turns over yet another pile of rubble and finds little in the way of supplies is a familiar companion. What he worries about now is that whilst he is finding enough to survive on each day, he is still not eating any more than his winter rations. He isn’t bringing home extra food to build up his stores for the next winter. He isn’t eating enough to offset the energy he is using, let alone gain back any of the pounds he lost through the cold months.

Next winter will be his last in his home city he reckons. He really doesn’t want to leave, unsure of the world beyond, and not wanting to leave where he has laid his siblings to rest. But he’s rational, he tells himself, he is a pragmatist. This winter hasn’t been so great, and he knows it won’t get better. This spring isn’t looking too brilliant so far either. Next winter will decide it for him - either he will starve to death through his own stubbornness and finally join his family, or he’ll scrape through somehow and be forced to swallow his pride and move on when the snows thaw.

A plastic wrapper rustles as he shifts the next brick, and he feels a hopeful lump rise in his throat, until he sees what he has uncovered and it drops again like a stone.

A Twinkie.

He throws it far away before his hunger overrules his mind. He had learnt the hard way last summer that the myth of a Twinkie’s endless shelf life was a load of bullshit. Desperate for the sugar and nostalgic for a rare childhood treat, he had ignored the sour aftertaste and devoured half of the multipack he had found in a single sitting.

He had paid for it dearly, making himself ill, and then weak from dehydration, after his digestive system had violently rejected its payload over the next 24 hours.

There is a clatter from the next house along. Five’s head shoots up and he freezes, holding his breath and straining his ears to hear any other sounds from the half-demolished shell. It could simply be something falling down an unstable pile of rubble.

It _could_ mean dinner.

Somehow, the rats have survived. Sometimes, if he catches them unaware, he can jump, catching them and killing them before they know what has happened. They don’t taste very good when he’s scorched them over a campfire, but he never turns down the protein.

Five doesn’t think he’ll ever turn down a free meal again.

The fact that the rats could survive hell didn’t actually surprise Five once he was confronted with the evidence. He’d been scavenging when he’d stumbled across a well nibbled corpse in a shell of a house. The broken kitchen cabinets were littered with scraps of packaging and fresh droppings, which had clued him in as to how the corpse had become that way. He can only assume they continue to survive now by eating themselves as well, otherwise he would expect them to be either completely dead as a species, or alive in much greater numbers by this point.

Either way they don’t help with his food struggles.

It is rare he finds anything that had been kept in flexible plastic packets nowadays, the rats having long chewed through the packaging and either eaten or spoiled what was inside. His only advantage is that their clever paws and determined teeth have yet to evolve to manage cans or glass, and they seem to leave water bottles alone. He has wondered if it is because water doesn’t smell of anything, but usually he just tries to be grateful his only source of water isn’t something he has to compete for.

He sags in disappointment when the clatter is followed by a low groan. Looks like it is company then, not dinner. He sighs, not really in the mood to be lectured at by an older self, but maybe they can help him find some supplies. With a quick check that his rucksack is in a spot that isn’t going to get crushed if a pile shifts, he picks his way out of the former house he was looting and towards where he can hear the shifting rubble and faint gasping.

He rounds the corner.

The Five that has come to visit doesn’t look much older than himself, but he is thin, painfully so, with the unhealthily pale pallor of his skin accentuated by a sharp splash of red sunburn across his nose and cheeks. There is a large yellow-green bruise lingering over his kidneys, a smattering of older cuts down his back. Five could count each of his ribs if he so pleased, just like his own, and his shoulder length hair is tangled and dirty.

Five reaches subconsciously to run a hand through his own, recently cropped mane.

This Five looks rough and unkempt, more so than is usual for living in hell. Five may be unable to bathe or shower except for some rare displacements to pre-2019, and he may not have a razor to deal with his thin and sparse facial hair, but he does at least own a comb and makes sure to use it each day.

The gasping is obviously from pain, rather than exertion, his side littered with new, vivid red scrapes that are beading with fresh blood. He is clearly favouring his right arm, which he cradles to his ribs as he desperately searches through the rubble.

The toe of Five’s boot catches on a loose stone as he picks his way over, and the clatter echoes loudly as it bounces away. The gaunt Five spins around with a gasp, something clasped tightly to his side with his left hand. Five squints but he can’t see what it is.

“What do you have there?” He asks suspiciously.

“N-nothing!” His visitor rasps.

Liar. But Five lets it go for a moment to ask- “What happened to your arm?”

His visitor blinks stupidly for a moment glancing down at the arm he is still protecting before staring warily at Five again. “Broke it, I think. A rubble pile collapsed about two weeks ago. I didn’t land very well.” His voice is dry and hoarse.

Five winces. That’s rough. He thinks he had broken one of his fingers last year, and the swelling had been hard to get down at first without any medicine, or the luxury of being able to rest it. Luckily, the bone hadn’t snapped, so his makeshift splints had been sufficient to get it to heal as well as could be hoped for. He had been unable to straighten it fully himself, unwilling to make it worse, so now his ring finger curls up a little crooked and aches when it is cold.

“Right. Well I’m going to continue looking for some lunch.” He says, when it becomes clear his visitor isn’t going to say anything else or impart any useful advice. Honestly, he’s a little relieved, he wasn’t in the mood for a lecture or even a chit-chat, too hungry to focus on being polite.

He turns to survey the piles, trying to decipher what room of the house it may have once been, and the likelihood of finding a pantry. He has just started to sift through what he thinks may once have been a kitchen cabinet when he hears the quiet pop of a lid coming off a jar.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his visitor freeze.

He spins around to see the other Five staring back wide eyed, a freshly opened and full jar of honey clasped guiltily between his knees, the lid in his good hand, which begins to tremble as Five’s gaze sharpens.

“Here, pass me that.” Five says, holding his hand out and curling his fingers in a ‘gimme’ gesture. His visitor shakes his head, his matted locks smacking into his protruding cheekbones. “Now.” He demands with a frown, stepping forward.

His visitor tenses up, shaking his head faster. “N-no!”

“Don’t be difficult, it’s my timeline and I need that, I haven’t found anything all day.” Five says, feeling a fire in his belly and a fierce tremble start in his shoulders as he walks over. “C’mon.”

“No!” His visitor denies again, frantically dipping a finger into the honey and sucking a great glob of it off his finger. “You don’t- Please, I need-” He cuts off with a gasp as Five lunges for him, blinking a few metres away.

Five stumbles and growls. “Stop being selfish and hand it over!”

He sees red as the other boy instead stuffs more honey into his mouth, incensed by the fat globules he can see go rolling down his chin, the precious liquid gold being wasted in his rush to get as much in to his mouth as quickly as possible.

With a scream, he jumps, tackling his visitor to the uneven ground and trying to steal the jar of honey from him. Just as he latches onto his shoulders there is a weak and sickly wash of blue light, and he feels like he is pulled through a bath of molasses, time slowing, and stretching, and stealing his breath from him.

He's not actually sure which of them initiated the jump.

Then time snaps back like a stretched elastic band and they fall out of the jump to land heavily at the top of the rubble pile. Five losing his grip on his opponent’s shoulders and they go falling away from each other as they tumble down the rubble. Five grunts as his back takes a beating, landing in a winded heap at the bottom.

He hears a pained cry as his opponent lands next to him, and out of the corner of his eye, he sees him curl into a ball, his chest heaving great, gasping sobs. Five rolls himself onto his side, his own chest aching as he tries to get his lungs to work properly again after his shock landing.

The jar lands in front of him with a clink, dirt and dust layered thick to the glass, and when he grasps it and draws it close, he can see grit sticking to the surface of what honey remains. Streaks of ruined honey are drooling down the sides. It was a small jar to begin with, barely bigger than his palm, and half of it is gone.

Five climbs to his feet and stumbles away, his back protesting heavily from the rough treatment. He digs his fingers into the honey greedily, barely scraping out the top with the grit before lifting golden-coated fingers to his mouth and licking them clean, groaning as the thick sweetness hits his tongue. He hasn’t had any honey since the middle of winter, when his second to last jar ran out.

The final jar is for emergencies only – just like the final jar of peanut butter and the bottle of vodka he keeps tucked in the back of the metal tool cabinet back at the garage.

He turns to face his crying visitor in time to see him clench his belly and dry heave before vanishing completely. He stares for a second at the empty patch of air, before turning away and finding a patch of mostly clear ground to sit on. He greedily scoops out another mouthful of honey to eat, before spreading a small amount across the fresh, raw and stinging cuts his can feel at his waist.

He’s not sure what that Five’s problem was, or why he wouldn’t hand over the honey to him. His older selves (and he has to assume that’s an older self, because he hasn’t had a broken arm yet) have never hesitated to help him scavenge and hand over anything they find before. They are older, more experienced, and know how hungry he is in the _now_. They should know how he would need to beat that hunger to get to their _then_.

They know that, so they help him.

The lid was lost in the scuffle, so he shrugs and continues to make himself a small feast of the jar – a great boost to his day that quiets the grumbling of his stomach and makes the exertion of the small fight and spatial jumps worth it.

***

Two weeks later and his moral is getting lower and lower. The pickings are still poor, and he is yet to actually move to a new shelter closer to the outskirts like he had planned. He has stopped jumping unless he has too – the energy it requires becoming more of a toll than its worth. His hunger is getting more desperate by the day and his stomach trying to tie itself in knots, because whilst he is spending more time out scavenging every day, he hasn’t dared to stop his winter rationing. He’s not convinced he is bringing back enough food each day to maintain his make-shift pantry if he starts to dip into his emergency supplies. Dolores starts to disagree with him once the small jumps he does attempt start to fail, trying to encourage him to dip into the stash by saying he should eat to keep up his strength, and that he would feel better if he did.

But his control is hanging on by a thread. If he allows himself to touch their emergency supplies, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop.

So, one day he decides it’s worth the risk, and starts tentatively searching in the types of areas he would have usually decided were too unstable. A few hours later, emboldened by the success of finding some extra supplies he risks scaling a suspicious-looking rubble pile, one that normally he wouldn’t even consider.

A suspicious-looking rubble pile that then collapses under his weight.

The falling debris clatters loudly as it buries the hard-earned supplies he had found that day. He falls with it, because there is no fuel in the tank to power the jump he instinctively tries to summon.

He lands badly, forgetting his training to curl and roll and instead trying to catch himself. His arm breaks with such a blinding pain he sees white and almost passes out.

When he comes back to full awareness there are tear tracks on his cheeks, and he is clutching his arm protectively to his chest. He goes to roll onto his side and push himself up with both hands, but pain shoots up from his wrist and he instead sobs from the pain and retracts his injured limb.

So, unable to afford the energy to jump, hampered by an arm he can barely move and no longer able to lift and search through rubble, Five learns there is a whole new level of hunger.

And when he lands naked and practically on top of a jar of honey, he doesn’t think twice about trying to hide such a precious miracle from his younger self.

Because now he _really_ needs it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there you have it. The conflict. Don’t mind me whilst I go hide in the corner… posting this chapter made me so nervous!
> 
> ….did I do ok?
> 
> Trying to keep this American is an exercise and a half I tell you. Cans instead of tins, Fall instead of Autumn etc. Feel free to point out accidental Brit-isms and I'll correct them!
> 
> * * *
> 
> This week’s fic rec is: [I Know It Sounds Crazy by fragilecapricornpanic ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25870273)  
> **Summary:** A look into what life was like for Diego in the mental institution, before the canon events of season 2. Kennedy, Lila, abusive conditions, and the long-overdue therapy... what lead to the difference between 2019 Diego, and 1963 Diego?
> 
> An 18-chapter WIP that is regularly updated. Honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t have more kudos than it does, but maybe people are too quick to judge it – to me it felt a little bit like it the first few paragraphs were finding the way a bit and then from the middle/end of the first chapter it starts to settle on to its stride. I spent most of my Saturday reading it last week! Fragilecapricornpanic does a really nice job of showing us how we got from Diego of s1, to the Diego Five finds in s2, taking you on a development journey of Diego (and Lila) and setting up the little details and quirks of s2 in a way that feels fresh not forced.


	7. Chapter 7

**Early summer 2023. Five is 17.**

It would be fair to say that since his relocation to hell, Five has had some dark days. Some hard days.

But these must be among the darkest.

His broken arm is healing slowly and painfully, supported only by what makeshift splinting and bandaging Five can manage with one hand, biting his sore lips to distract himself from the pain. It is a small mercy that he didn’t break his dominant arm really, as that probably would have been game over. As it is, every day is still a struggle. He has the feeling that his arm should be further along than it is, that the pain should be easing by now, the bone should be mending, and his limb should be strengthening again.

The lack of decent nutrition in hell just serves to keep finding new ways to screw him over.

Fighting with himself when he displaced last week had done him no favours, his arm had throbbed with pain for days after. The new bruises down his arms, sides, and back are deep and lingering, layered on top of the older wounds that just aren’t going away. His shoulders are still decorated with little green fingerprints from where his past self had grabbed a hold of him. There is little in the way of padding on his bones now, no real protection against injury, or cold, or starvation.

And starvation is an actual, genuine, and immediate concern now, rather than just something he has to be proactive and plan to prevent.

Five just stares straight ahead from where he is curled up in bed, gaze unfocused. He thinks Dolores may be trying to talk to him from where she perches on their makeshift table behind him, but he can’t concentrate. Her words are like a fuzzy static in the background, like the noise on Herr Carlson’s recorded lectures in the moment before he started speaking. He has the glass eye held loosely in his hand, a cool and bitter comfort that serves to remind him that this is all real. He thinks he might do this often – hold the eye – but right now he can’t quite remember why he finds it so fascinating.

A rat scampers across the floor of their shelter, nose and whiskers twitching as it seeks out food. Five watches it lazily, his stomach growling at the potential source of food and a part of his mind screams _just look how fat it is! That’s a whole meal right there!_

He watches it forage around where his jar of emergency peanut butter sits. It pokes its head into the empty beans cans and backs out again, leaving disappointed.

Five can commiserate.

His tongue and fingers are sliced and sore from licking each can clean.

A stray can falls over with a clatter and spooks the rat, causing it to scurry away and disappear to wherever it came from. Five hears Dolores sigh, but he doesn’t respond. He runs his fat, dry tongue over chapped and split lips. He can barely make the effort to curl his fingers into his blankets and pull them higher towards his chin.

He won’t be hunting any rats today.

The rats have grown bolder as Five has become weak. They never used to come into his shelter, never dared try to investigate his food stash. He was always too quick for them, a simple jump with something heavy in hand and he had a free meal, and they had learnt that.

But now? Now they know he can’t chase them off, let alone make a meal of them. His jumps haven’t been working since his disastrous displacement. Too weak, too hungry. _Too pathetic._

There is just no fuel left in the tank for his powers, and there is nearly nothing left for the rest of him either.

He had halved his daily rations after the first week of his injury, once he accepted that he just couldn’t go searching for supplies the way he was used too. The way he needed too. Last week he had reluctantly halved it again, painstakingly eyeing up his rapidly dwindling supply and still unable to use his broken arm for any lifting or support.

Those supplies had included his water too.

And he thinks it was probably the further restrictions of his water that is doing him in.

Strong urine has become his new normal in this hellscape, as had water infections unfortunately, but yesterday when he made the slow and stumbling effort to drag himself out of his pit and stagger dizzily outside to relieve himself it had come so reluctantly, so dark and stale, that it hadn’t surprised him when he didn’t need to go again.

He still hasn’t been again, even now, nearly a whole day later.

In a moment of lucidity, he had realised he probably should have started saving his urine for just these sorts of dire, dire emergencies, even though the thought of it would normally make him gag.

Now he doesn’t really want to consider what it means for his survival chances.

Five has never come so close to giving up. To giving in.

But he is contemplating it now.

Would it really be so bad?

Would Klaus really blame him?

_Vanya would understand._

….Maybe his ghost could displace back, and he could stay with Klaus all the time, could watch his brothers and sisters. Klaus would talk to him, and he’d pass his messages on to his family.

Maybe he already has. Maybe he’s that patch of air that grown up Klaus speaks to sometimes.

 _That’d be nice._ He thinks vaguely as he drifts away again.

_That’d be… really…….. nice…_

* * *

**Jail. November 2016. Klaus is 2** **7\. Five is 17.**

“Solitary is a real bitch.”

Klaus whines as he paces his cell. _Three steps, spin, three steps spin, three steps spin…._

“Well maybe you wouldn’t be in here so long if you didn’t keep talking to ‘yourself’.” Ben says from where he leans against the wall, hood up and hands shoved deep into his pockets. Klaus hisses at him. “Better yet, maybe they wouldn’t put you in here at all if you didn’t keep propositioning the guards in exchange for drugs.”

“But Ben, you can’t even get a damn cigarette in here!” Klaus has needs, damnit, and honestly, he’d have taken the lay even without any drugs. That guard was _hot._

“Maybe the universe is trying to tell you to quit. Stay sober.”

“ _Blasphemy!”_ Klaus hisses. “I need-”

He is cut off by a dull thud. They both turn to look at the back of the small cell to see-

“…Five?” Ben whispers.

Klaus stumbles forward. _Three steps._ His hands shake as he grasps at his brother’s thin arm and shoulder, trying to roll him onto his side rather than in the face down sprawl in which he has landed.

He looks dead.

He hisses as he turns Five and he rolls limply, the curtain of dirty tangled hair falling away as his head lolls to reveal a dry, pinched, and sunken face. There are dark shadows around his eyes, and his lips are cracked and pale. But he’s alive, his pulse quick, and weak, and fluttery under Klaus’s desperate fingers. Klaus gives Five’s bony and bruised shoulders a small shake, numbly tying to rouse him, and Ben makes a wounded noise behind his shoulder.

Klaus himself feels sick.

_What has happened to his brother?_

He tries to wake him by patting his cheeks, and turns to share a panicked look with Ben when there is no reaction.

“Shit. What’s wrong with him?” He whispers. “Ben! What do I do?”

“I don’t know! Why is he unconscious?” Ben leans over Five, his hands hovering uselessly. “Has he hit his head?”

Klaus feels around the back of Five’s head, burying his fingers under tangled hair to feel for lumps or blood. “No, no there’s nothing!” He gasps. He reaches down to rap his knuckles against Fives’ collarbone, the drug-fuzzed memory of paramedics doing the same to him coming to mind. Even in his heavier states he had responded to _that_ pain.

Five doesn’t even twitch.

“Shit. Shit, shit shit!”

“Klaus, calm down!

Klaus barely hears him, unable to tear his eyes away from Five as he sits back on his heels. “What do I do, what do I _do?_ ” he mutters frantically under his breath.

“Klaus, you need to calm down!”

Klaus flinches away from Ben’s shout, scrabbling to catch himself before he tips over. He stares numbly at Ben, chest heaving with panic. It’s a shock, Ben shouting at him. Ben knows about the nasties, has seen them firsthand. He’ll nag ‘til kingdom come, and annoy Klaus near to death sometimes, but he doesn’t shout.

“Klaus, you need to call for help.”

“What?”

Ben’s eyes narrow. “You need to call for help!” He insists.

“I can’t do that!” Klaus hisses, glancing at the door. “How do I explain somebody just _appearing_ in solitary?”

“Who cares?” Ben shouts, gesturing angrily at Five. “Our brother is sick. He needs help!”

“Shit.” Klaus whispers. “Shit, okay.” He pats Five’s shoulder, gives him another worried glance and then stumbles over to the cell door.

“Hey!” He screams, banging on the door as loudly as he can manage. “Hey! Guard! We need some help down here!”

Nothing. He turns to look back at Five, hoping that maybe the noise had stirred him. Ben shakes his head from where he’s crouched next to him.

Klaus’ heart sinks.

“Hey! There’s a sick kid in here!” He screams through the little letterbox opening. He gives the metal door a kick, and then curses, hopping as his foot erupts in pain. “Please, help!”

He hears footsteps, the heavy tread of boots approaching down the hallway. Mentioning a kid seems to have done the trick.

Klaus backs away from the door as a shadow blocks the small opening of light, raising his hands in the air.

“Please,” -He gasps out as the guard opens the door, stepping back against the wall so they have a clear view of Five- “I don’t know where he came from, he just appeared! But he’s sick-“

The guard steps back and slams the door shut.

“What- no, no, no, no, no!” Klaus screams, lunging forwards and slamming his fists against the door. He can hear the guard marching off. “Come back! He needs help!”

He turns back to Ben, who looks as angry as he feels. He staggers back over to Five, sinking to his knees.

“I tried.” He whispers, gently brushing the tangled hair away from his brother’s sallow face. “I tried buddy, but I don’t know what else I can do.”

“We know he survives this.” Ben says lowly. Klaus looks at him; he has his hood pulled up, casting shadows over his face, crouched on the side of Five. His hands clenched helplessly in tight fists on top of his knees. “He must do, we’ve seen him older than this.”

“Does he?” Klaus croaks. “Because it’s not happened for him yet. That stupid guard won’t help him, and who knows when they’ll be back to get me, and does he even have that long?” He waves angrily at the door.

“He must-”

“We don’t know that!” Klaus bursts. “We don’t! I just can’t believe everything is set in time and pre-determined, because what about free will? And if it’s not set, he could die here! He could! And the older Five’s we’ve seen are actually from a time when somebody who was less of an ass-hat came to that door and helped, and all the Five’s we’ve been seeing have just been jumping across different timelines and after all this it turns out time is just one big noodle-y mess!”

“Klaus-”

“Don’t Ben. Just… don’t.”

And Ben doesn’t. His lips are pressed thin, and he clearly disapproves, but he doesn’t push.

And Klaus is grateful.

He keeps on tenderly stroking Five’s matted and tangled hair, trying to gently tease out of the knots at the end before he realises they are probably beyond hope. He tries to ignore the strong smell of unwashed and sick teenager that seems to roll off his little brother in waves. His heart aches with sympathy, and his stomach writhes with guilt.

Five has never told him about any of this.

His little brother looks like the worst of the homeless kids on the street. His little brother looks desperately uncared for, like he is unwanted and unloved.

It’s not true. It’s not.

If Five just came back to his family, they would look after him. Diego would put him up if he didn’t want to be stuck in the academy with just their dad kicking about. Luther would probably come back from his mission on the moon to see him. Probably, Klaus thinks, because there is the possibility Dad might tell him _no_ , and Luther would listen to that.

Allison would probably come back to see him, and would make sure whoever did put him up had the money to do so, because Klaus can’t see Five wanting to go with her to LA (but who knows, maybe he’s wrong – it’s hard to know your brother when you see him so infrequently).

Vanya would take him.

Vanya would take him in a heartbeat.

Her precious Five, the favourite of her brothers and the one who got off the lightest in her little tell-all book. The one she would get up in the night and make peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches for, and leave all the lights on for (never mind that Five used to like to have the lights on for _Klaus’_ benefit).

Okay, so maybe Klaus is still a _little_ bit bitter about her book.

Nobody would let Klaus in. Well, maybe Diego, but even that would have _conditions_ attached (a voice that sounds a bit like Ben tells him in the back of his mind that maybe he shouldn’t have kept emptying both his cupboards and his wallet the times Diego did let him in).

They would whisk Five away to their home, and smother him, and for Klaus it would be like nothing changed, only able to see his brother when he displaced.

Not that Klaus is jealous or anything.

He’s not.

His lifestyle…. isn’t great, but it works for him. He generally gets what he needs, one way or another, and with only a few troublesome detours along the way, like rehab or jail. No biggie.

He likes to think of himself as a carefree nomad, but really, it just means he would have nothing to offer Five. He tries not to think about it.

Still, he wonders when his present will catch up with wherever Five landed, when he ran away all those years ago. _Decades_ , he had said, _he’d landed decades into the future._

_Had he landed beyond their lifetimes?_

Is that why his brother is this sickly? Why he bears all the same markers of homelessness Klaus has worn over the years?

The reason why he looks so alone?

_“I’m stuck in the future, on my own.” Five glances up at him quickly. Klaus stares back in shock, absent-mindedly stubbing out his rollup in the mug and ignoring Ben who is leaning against the wall. “There’s no one to help. I don’t know what to do.”_

Little Five had told him last year that he was alone. But Klaus had thought it was temporary, a blip from where and when he landed and that he’d find help. Thought that things would quickly get better for him. Five’s always been a resourceful little shit, the most adaptive of them all, and in the all the years he has visited Klaus, he’s never let on that things got this bad for him.

Because it isn’t a short, sharp disaster that has his brother looking this way, too weak to stay conscious. Even Klaus can see that. No, it’s a long and cruel decline.

The scrape of the door opening echoes loudly in the cell. Klaus jumps, spinning on his heels.

“Hands up where we can see ‘em.” The ass-hat guard stands at the door, gesturing Klaus to move to the wall, another guard and a doctor standing behind him.

Klaus remembers the doctor from his brutal detox, an older gentleman with steady hands, who spoke softly but took none of Klaus’ shit.

Naturally, Ben had loved him.

He scrambles across to the side of the cell, putting his back to the wall and hands palm out against his chest. He glances back at Five.

“Please, I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he’s not responding-”

“Shut it. Unless you want to tell us how he got in here?” The guard threatens, stepping in front of him to cuff his wrists. The doctor scurries behind him to kneel next to Five, placing his stethoscope to his chest and hmming distractedly.

“Here, bring that stretcher.” He says to the second guard at the door, peeling back Five’s eyelids and shining a flashlight in his eyes before pinching some skin on his hand and watching how it sinks ever so slowly back down.

Klaus feels sick. His memory of the first aid drilled into them as children may be hazy with time (and chemical interventions) but even he can remember that that is very much a not-good sign.

A third guard arrives as they are loading Five up, and they take him away, the doctor striding alongside the stretcher with his hand on Five’s wrist to take his pulse.

“Is he going to be okay?” Klaus asks as his guard leads him from the cell, Ben following behind silently. Klaus tries to subtly gesture to him to follow Five instead, his fingers and head twitching.

“Don’t you be worrying about that.” The guard says, shaking his arms. “You better be thinking about telling us just how he got in to that cell with you instead.”

Klaus protests as he is led down the corridors.

“I told you, he just appeared-”

***

When Klaus makes his way to a guard later that day at the evening meal and asks how Five is doing, he is rebuffed. Ben reappears in his cell a few hours later, and quietly tells him that they had hooked Five up to various drips and a feeding tube, and that there hadn’t been any sign of him waking.

When he asks the next day, after a night of worried tossing and turning on his bunk, whispering back and forth to Ben who flits back to the medical bay several times, the guards once again refuse to answer.

They still refuse to answer, even when he begs, after Ben returns on the third night with a frown to say the medical bay is in chaos, because Five isn’t there anymore.

So as soon as the opportunity arrives, Klaus weighs up his fellow inmates, and intentionally picks a fight the next day, deliberately taking a few extra hits. A fight that results in him needing medical attention - except it is a new doctor that stitches his arm back together with pursed lips and a disapproving air, refusing to answer any of his questions, and the medical ward is truly empty.

For days Klaus is questioned over, and over about how Five appeared, who he was.

He refuses to answer their questions.

And they refuse to answer his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump this week – I had a great routine with writing time carved out but now I’m working from home again so trying to rediscover a dedicated time and headspace. I have about five chapters written up once we hit the s1 arc. I just don’t have the bridge between here and there yet. Fun fact, originally there were only 3 apocalyptic chapters, but then I was writing stuff in s1 and was like this needs more set up, and hmm yeah this needs background and suddenly the apocalypse ballooned into the whole first act. So, I’ve now caught myself up. So fair warning, my intention is to keep to an update each weekend, but for the next two or three chapters that might slip a bit if I don’t get them finished in time.
> 
> That said, I hope you enjoyed this chapter – I think it’s the first time I’ve actually followed up a scene/chapter into the next one. Let me know if it works – this fic is very much a journey of learning to write. I’m open to both constructive critique and/or pure love type comments!
> 
> On that note, kudos, bookmarks and subscriptions are love, because they tell me people are enjoying my story and want to see more, so thank you so much for leaving those <3 But what really, really makes my day and helps lift me through writing stubborn scenes are comments. As a reader for 7 years I never realised what a difference a simple “I loved this chapter/scene/bit of dialogue” can make to the person writing. That feeling you get when your favourite story gets updated? Times it by ten and you’ll know how it feels when somebody takes the time to write a comment. 
> 
> So, if you are at all considering leaving a comment (on anybody’s fic) please do!
> 
> * * *
> 
> This week’s fic rec is: [Lost in the Middle by aye_of_newt ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23867662)  
> **Summary:** For the first twelve years of his life, Klaus' powers were barely useful as he was unable to see nor hear any more of the dead than shadowy figures or unintelligible voices. It was only after he took a rather nasty tumble down the stairs and broke his jaw, prompting Reginald to allow Klaus to be given a small dose of morphine, that he was able to fully connect to the plane between the living and the dead.
> 
> An AU in which drugs have the opposite effect on Klaus' powers. And what a fic it is. It’s 150k of angst, angst and more glorious angst all the way down, and then payoff, payoff, payoff all the way back up again. I’ve been waiting until it was complete to share it, so please head over and give it some love, then subscribe to the series so you can be alerted when the sequel drops in December.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summer 2023. Five is 17 (and 52ish).**

Waking up comes in stages.

There are many soft, dark moments where all Five is aware of is some far off sound, like a muffled bleeping or strange voices. Then it starts being only one voice, and there is an arm behind his neck lifting his head, and the taste and feel of warm, watery soup being gently spooned into his mouth.

Slowly he starts to become more aware, hearing the crackling of a fire and starting to become familiar with the growly voice that mutters as he is fed, but too tired to make sense of any of the words. Once or twice, it is the feeling of hands on his body, the act of being turned onto his side sending him spiralling back into the dark. Sometimes it is simply a feeling, a sense that there is somebody moving around him.

Then one time he swims up from the darkness and he manages to half open his eyes, blinking lazily into the dim and flickering light. The first thing he focuses on is Dolores, who is dozing in the chair. He squints, confused as to why she seems to be sparkling and unsure if it is just his eyes playing tricks on him. But no, when he manages to pull his hand from under the blankets and clumsily rub away the sleep crusted in the corner of his eyes, she still sparkles with the flickering light of the fire.

Speaking of fire, his stomach growls loudly as his next sense wakes up, the smell of canned soup drifts over him. He struggles to push himself up with one arm, covers pooling at his waist as he stares at the steaming can strung over the fire. He lets out a disbelieving huff, blinking fiercely to disperse the mirage before he really gets his hopes up.

…It’s still there.

“Dolores.” He whispers hoarsely, then startles slightly, surprised. His throat is dry, but it should feel worse than this he thinks, fuzzy memories drifting slowly to the surface. He had been down to his last small bottle of water, he had felt _awful_. “Dolores, wake up.”

Slowly, oh so slowly, he draws his legs underneath him, pushes himself up onto his knees (he doesn’t think he would trust his legs even if he had the energy to stand) and half-crawls, half-shuffles out of his nest towards her chair.

 _Sequins,_ he thinks distantly, _that’s why she’s sparkling, she has sequins_.

Followed by-

_When did she get sequins?_

He sits heavily next to her chair, one hand reaching up to pinch the shimmering silver top between his fingers, twisting it to feel the small, scaled edges on his fingertips and mesmerised by the way the light twists and sparkles with the movement.

 _Real._ He thinks slowly. _It’s real, so…_

He turns to eye the pot over the fire.

_…that might be real too?_

“Dolores-” He says slowly, “-how did that get here?”

“Oh. Good, you’re awake. Finally.” Five flinches at the gravelly voice behind him, head turning a second later as the cotton wool in his brain catches up. “Obviously you were going to be eventually, but there was a moment or two where even I doubted it.”

He steps across the camp, picking up a pot as he goes. Five squints, he doesn’t recognise that pot, or the metal kettle that the older Five is pouring the water from the pot into.

“Have I gone forwards?” He mutters, confused.

Older Five snorts. “Hah! No. Looks like I’ve been dragged back for a while to save our sorry ass.” He hangs the kettle on the frame he must have constructed, before lifting off the soup can hanging from some cleverly twisted wire. Wrapping it in an old sweater he places it in Fives lap, and drops a spoon into it.

“Eat up.” He grunts, stepping back to the fire. “I’ve been watering it down to feed it you but you can manage yourself now.”

So Five dedicates himself to eating his soup, carefully lifting each spoonful to his mouth and enjoying how the warmth of the can radiates through the sweater. He ignores older Five’s muttering until he sees him pour steaming water from the kettle into an old tin mug and mix in brown granules from a jar.

Older Five spots him watching. “You want coffee?” He says, gesturing with the mug. Five shakes his head numbly. “Really? Hmph. Well, you’ll like it soon enough. Explains why you didn’t have a damn kettle – wasn’t like it was difficult to find one.” He sets a mug of warm water on the ground in front of Five.

Five scrapes the spoon around the can to collect the dregs, noisily slurping them from the spoon, and then looks around, a bit more aware with warm food sitting in his belly. He blinks twice, then twice again, when his gaze settles on the corner.

“Where did you find all the supplies?” He croaks, staring at the pile of cans and jars next to several large bottles of water. There is even a stack of broken down wooden furniture to burn on the fire. He picks up his drink absent-mindedly and starts taking small sips as he stares at the bounty.

No wonder this older Five hadn’t seemed concerned with using a bit of water to swill out the mugs before pouring the drinks – there are more supplies here than he used in the last _month_.

Older Five looks at him sideways, one hand running down his scraggly grey-washed beard. “Made a few jumps to the next town over.” He says finally. “And got Dolores something nice to wear whilst I was at it, since she’s had to watch over your sorry state this week.”

Five dribbles his water in shock.

_A week?_

“You’ve been here a whole week?” He checks, glancing between his older self, the supplies and the rumpled nest of blankets he had crawled out of.

“Well, four days.” Older Five muses, and then knocks back the rest of his coffee. “I could rouse you enough to get you to piss in a bottle – sorry Dolores – but this is the first time you’ve been aware enough to get out of bed or hold a conversation.” He cackles. “Which is great timing because I wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with your other toiletry needs now you’ve got some food in you again.”

Five’s cheeks burn with mortification.

Because he’s not wrong… Now he mentions it Five can feel a trip to the pile of rubble he had designated as the privy pile coming on.

He frantically digs around for another topic of conversation.

“Wait, did you say you jumped to the next _town?_ ” He says wonderingly, mind struggling to grasp just how much energy and concentration that would take. He had barely been able to do that kind of distance _before_ he jumped into the apocalypse, with three square meals a day and a rigorous training schedule keeping him in shape.

Older Five lets out a deep sigh. “Christ, I forget how limited I used to be.” Five can’t help but flinch a little at how that stings, the old familiar hurt of being limited, to never matching up to expectations of what he should be able to do with his power. Not being good enough. “Yes, I jumped to the next town, several times in fact.”

“When do I learn to do that?” Five says eagerly. Oh the possibilities if he can blink to other towns for supplies-

“When you finally get up the guts and leave this place.”

Five shakes his head, _no, he can’t leave, his family are here_ -

“If you don’t leave then you’ll die here. Look at you! You need to-”

But whatever Five needs to do, he doesn’t find out, because his elder self vanishes, empty clothes falling into a heap beside the jar of coffee. Like they so often do when they try to tell him something about his future.

Well, shit.

* * *

**Fall 2023. Five is 17.**

Things are improving.

The food situation has gotten better for one. It is still going to be a tight winter, unless he finds another jackpot, but he at least he can now be reasonably confident he will actually survive the next winter.

There had been some dark days in the summer.

Some really, really, dark days.

But things are looking up a bit now. His elder self had left him enough supplies to keep him fed until he could get himself back on his feet and scavenging again after his illness. And sure, the days are getting shorter, with less time to work as the days march steadily towards the long dark nights of winter, but he has managed to move to the suburbs now. That’s improvement number two. At first, it was temporary, living in makeshift camps, but now he has a permanent shelter after he found a particularly sturdy little house that had pretty much survived the apocalypse.

Okay, so all the windows are blown through, and there is a hole in the roof, but it still has four exterior walls intact and a working door. It is going to be his largest winter shelter yet, and it even has a bookshelf where he can store the few textbooks and all of the notebooks he has been working on.

He had originally worried that he would have to leave the trailer behind, and only take the most important notebooks with him. His ability to jump has come back now he is eating better, but he is still only using it sparingly and can’t muster up the energy to bring much more than the clothes on his back with him through the jump.

Luckily, another future Five had fallen into his shelter one evening as he sat cross-legged on the ground, using the weak light of a wind-up camping lantern to see by as he sorted through his textbooks and notebooks. He wasn’t going to be able to carry them all, and he had other stuff he needed to keep that was more important for his immediate survival, as much as it hurt to think of leaving behind things that might help him to get home one day. His rucksack was only so big, and there were only so many trips back and forth he could afford to take when he hadn’t finished stocking up on winter supplies.

Future Five had looked well fed and groomed. Relatively, anyway. Maybe better fed than groomed. Late twenties perhaps, with lightly browned skin that seemed to be a genuine tan, rather than the itchy layer of dirt that Five was used to sporting. His beard had come in properly too, not like the sparse patches decorating Five’s chin, and he wore his hair longer than the shoulder crop Five favoured now. He had even stolen one of Five’s old bootlaces to secure the practical-looking braid he deftly wove it into after using his comb.

Most importantly though, this Five had energy to spare. Wiry muscle to help lift and pack the trailer, and enough power for several jumps across to the outskirts taking the full trailer with him, so that Five could start camping and searching for a winter shelter without giving up his belongings. He’d barely touched Five’s food, only accepting a share of a can of beans on the second day when his stomach had growled so loudly that neither of them could continue politely pretending they believed him when he said he wasn’t hungry.

It had been a really nice couple of days, and for once Five had actually been sad to see his older self leave again. He didn’t get many displacements that lasted days, and this visiting Five had been old enough to be able to give him advice, but young enough to still have sympathy for him, not yet eroded to expose the jaded and tired air that the older Fives carried. He had even tried patiently to teach Five to braid his own hair when they rested one evening, wincing at the loose and lopsided results before finally giving up and declaring Klaus would do a much better job of teaching him anyway.

The next evening, after a day of scavenging, he had returned to their camp with a wide grin on his face. Five had been excited because his rucksack bulged with bottled water, and a new sleeping bag swung from his arm, but what really had older Five smiling were the maps he produced. Someone had apparently been preparing for a road trip when the apocalypse struck – older Five had come across their truck in a partially collapsed garage, filled with camping supplies and several state maps.

“This is the map you’ll really want.” He had said excitedly, unfolding it and laying it out so they could both see it. He had tapped firmly on the highway, tracing the route out of the city. “This is your ticket out – this city is killing you. You need to head west.”

He had left not much longer after that, the pen he had been using to enthusiastically circle a few key towns dropping to the floor. Five had cast his eye over the map, scanning the scrawled notes detailing the supplies he might find, and then he folded it up and put it way where he couldn’t see it.

He couldn’t afford to be thinking about moving on, he told himself. He needed to focus on getting ready for winter.

But he can’t deny that being further away from the academy and the area he’d buried his siblings has really given him the advantage – he’s closer to the unsearched areas and the roads aren’t as torn up, or clogged with abandoned vehicles and collapsed buildings. He can take his trailer out with him much more easily, dragging it behind him until he finds an area he wants to search. That means Dolores can come with him again on the days where the weather is clear, and her light conversation and sarcastic assumptions about the former owners of the houses they find, always serves to lift his spirits.

She hasn’t come out with him today though, having decided to stay at home and read the latest romance novel that Five had found for her when hunting through someone’s collapsed bookshelf. He can’t say he blames her for wanting to stay back, the wind is bitter when the gusts blow through his clothes, and the on and off rain just makes the experience all the more miserable.

He counts the jars of pickles as he places them in his rucksack, pleased with what he had found in the pantry that was mostly still standing. He had circled the house three times to study it before he had decided to risk searching it, concerned by the structure only having three walls still standing yet still somehow supporting most of the second floor. But, the risk has been worth it – an unopened jar of honey, several cans of soup (long past their expiration but probably still fine Five reckons), beans and lots and lots of pickled vegetables have been added to his trailer.

And a wrist splint. The irony of finding a wrist splint _after_ his arm is mostly healed doesn’t escape him, but he straps it on anyway, pleased with the support it offers.

He’s very pleased with today’s haul, but even so he is starting to face the reality that his older self may have been right. There aren’t many areas left to search now, and intellectually he knows there won’t be enough supplies left to see him through next year.

Come spring, he is going to have to move on if he wants to survive.

He looks up sharply as a particularly strong and whistling gust of wind comes blasting through, tense and ready to blink out and back to the trailer at the slightest movement, but the structure holds. He zips up his rucksack and slips it onto his back, eyeing up the carpeted stairs with such intensity it is as if he could see through them to check for rotten boards if only he stares hard enough.

He can’t. Despite his best efforts he hasn’t manifested any extra powers since landing in hell - he hasn’t even managed to learn to control his displacements.

Fuck it. He’s going to risk searching the upstairs, he could do with finding some extra clothes and boots, maybe something new for Dolores to wear.

He treads carefully on the stairs, one hand holding tight to his rucksack strap and the other gripping the railing, ready to blink away at the slightest give under his feet.

He sighs with relief and shakes the tension out of his arms as he reaches the top with barely a creak.

“Good staircase.” He murmurs, giving the railing a grateful pat and moving through the first doorway. The wallpaper is peeling, but where it isn’t obscured by black mould the pattern is pink and feminine. The bed is under where the window used to be, the sheets covered in shimmering shards of glass. Five treads carefully across the dresser, stretching his foot out and slowly sinking his weight, testing each floorboard as he goes.

His heart leaps into his throat as one creaks and dips, and he snatches his foot back before it can give way.

When he finally creeps his way to the dresser, he blows at the thick layer of dust that coats everything, coughing as it sweeps straight back at him. He picks up the photo frame and wipes it clear with his sleeve.

His heart aches. The girl that smiles back at him reminds him of a photo of Allison that Vanya had included in her book, one that had taken a few years after he left. A charming smile, dark curly hair pulled back into a high ponytail. The similarities end there however, as this unknown girl is stood on a podium, holding up a medal to the camera as she teeters on ice skates.

He doesn’t know what happened to Allison, or what she went on to do, but somehow he doesn’t think ice skating would have been it. Or sport in general really.

 _Still_ , he thinks, placing the picture frame back carefully amongst the trophies, _Allison was so ambitious she probably would have been just as successful_.

Hopefully, he’ll find another copy of Vanya’s book one day. He scours every bookshelf, and spends more time than he really should hunting through the rubble when he finds a bookstore, but he is yet to find a second copy to replace the one he lost when he displaced mid-read, leaving the book to be eaten by his untended campfire.

He knows all their names now, knows how they still went on missions without him. How Vanya felt further and further away from them. How Klaus’ drug habit really started to pick up in their mid-teens. But nothing past their mid-teens. All because he stupidly didn’t put the book down before he displaced. His family’s life lost to the ash once more.

He misses them so much. Misses how Luther would bark orders, and how Diego never backed down from a dare. Longs to sit with Vanya, to tell her just how shit the future is and how he wishes he’d been there to congratulate her on getting into the local youth orchestra programme. Misses Ben, his quiet companionship, and his well-masked deviousness.

Misses Klaus, because even though he still gets to see him, his trips to the past are never long enough, never permanent, and every time he comes back to the loneliness of hell it feels like Klaus has died all over again.

Five comes back to himself with a start as something clatters outside, and the wind whips through the room. He shivers, despite his warm coat, and focuses back on where his fingers have been hovering on a wooden box. Maybe it would make a nice gift for Dolores, somewhere to keep her necklaces. He lifts the lid gently, trying not to snap the stiff, thin hinges.

A tune begins to play.

His fingers tremble as he touches the slowly spinning ballerina, the tinkling tune bringing tears to his eyes and lump to his throat. At first, he’s not sure why he’s so emotional, but as the tune stutters to a halt he turns the box frantically, trying to find the key to wind it up.

A few cranks and the tune starts up again, slightly quicker, and he knows. He recognises it.

Vanya used to play the tune on her violin when she was upset. It is the same song he had heard Grace singing quietly to his siblings when she would tuck them in to their beds at night.

(The one he had only let her sing to him when he was sick, and weak enough to accept the comfort.)

One of the many songs Klaus would hum under his breath as they did their homework together.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” He sings along quietly, voice hoarse, barely above a whisper.

“You make me happy, when skies are grey.” His eyes sting with tears. “You’ll never know dear, how much I love you…”

He chokes on a sob, sinking to the floor with the box in his hands. The loss of his family feeling extra raw in this moment, with the decision to leave the city and their cairns, potentially forever, hanging over him.

“So please don’t take my sunshine away…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh wow, ok, so the love I got in the comments this past week was just…. <3 Thank you so much. It was honestly such a boost, I loved reading and replying to them all (even if all I want to do is discuss your/my ideas with you but I can’t because it’d be spoilers!!). Subscriptions, kudos, bookmarks are all great indicators of people liking the story and I do appreciate them a lot, but comments are things I can come back too when writing is hard – they are just the gift that keeps on giving.
> 
> In return, please have some glimpses at older Fives and a dreadfully lonely and upset Five singing childhood lullabies to himself. Because sad is apparently my aesthetic.
> 
> So, I’m curious – how do you find new fics? (how did you find this fic?) I generally have two tabs open for the TUA tag, sorted by update date, (excluding reader inserts because they just don’t work for me) and the only difference is one tab is for completed works and the other for works in progress. And then I just scan them for any summaries I like the look of. I only tend to search for specific tags when I get a hankering for something particular, or order by kudos when new to a fandom.
> 
> Next chapter, Five comes of age and leaves *home*
> 
> * * *
> 
> *Edit* I am going back and fixing empty links for the recs, but for some reason, no matter how many times I re-establish the link in the first 24hours of posting a chapter, it always removes it. Sorry!
> 
> This week’s fic rec is: [If You Give a Conspiracy Theorist an Alien by MyDarlingClementine & theboywantscoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27717433/chapters/67839586)  
>  **Summary:** Elliott always knew aliens were real but never anticipated one to willingly show up on his doorstep, much less in knee-high socks. And as for Five? Well, he never thought his best chance to reunite with his family would come in the form of a scrawny conspiracy theorist brandishing a butter knife.
> 
> After last week’s 150k rec, please have a more bitesize 5k rec! It’s an enjoyable little look at Five and Elliott’s relationship in S2 that also gives us a bit of closure.


	9. Chapter 9

**April-ish (but definitely spring) 2024. Five is 18 (he thinks).**

“Do you want to pack the pink blouse, or the yellow?”

Five asks, turning around so he can hold both options up where Dolores can see them.

This had been the theme of their life for the last few weeks. As the daylight hours continue to get longer and the weather slowly warms, they have been venturing out to scavenge as many supplies as they could. After a day of searching, they will spend their evenings sorting through both their supplies and their belongings, trying to decide what they should leave behind, and what they can’t live without.

Whether or not Dolores will get to take a few of her favourite outfits has never been in question. When Five had turned away from the old duffel bag he was using to pack his stash of boots and clothing, he had barely begun to ask the question before his mouth was clicking shut again. Swiftly silenced by the sheer power of the look that Dolores had levelled at him.

Message received, loud and clear.

If Dolores puts up with his shit, then she gets to take a bag of her favourite clothes too.

“The pink?” He says, eyeing them up. “Hmm, yeah I see your point, the yellow does look a bit tired.” He tosses the stained yellow blouse into the ‘leave’ corner. The corner is one of Dolores’ ideas of course, because most sensible things are. If they don’t want it, or aren’t sure if they really need it, they put it in the leave corner. If it is still there the week after, they can clearly live without it.

So far, the only thing that has come crawling back from the corner was the well-worn copy of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’.

He had told himself, quite firmly, that they could only take what they needed to survive. Practical items. Things that they needed for living, and only the most important books and notes for figuring out how to get home. Dolores had disagreed, gently suggesting that he was allowed a small treat, something he kept purely because he wanted it. But she wasn’t the one that would have to drag the wagon, have to weigh up the benefit of having extra stuff against the cost of having to move it all. So, he had shaken his head, and regretfully put it with the pile of other books to be left, nestled amongst Dolores’ romances and his own fantasy novels.

Besides, it is a children’s story, and he has to grow up eventually.

As a child he had preferred adventure stories, and ironically had just started reading dystopian fiction with Ben before he ran away. But the apocalypse has soured his appreciation for it, and now his tastes run more towards escapism.

Anything where he can pretend, even just for five minutes, that he is not stuck in hell.

And Narnia does just that. A world of snow, and companionship, and life. Good triumphing over evil. Magic, not powers. Brothers and sisters, forgiving each other for their pride or mistakes, and coming together to save the day.

He sees Luther’s decisiveness in High King Peter, Allison’s charm and Diego’s impeccable aim in Susan, and Vanya’s good judgement in Lucy. The yellowed pages are worn soft around the edges, and dirty fingerprints mar the print. The hardback cover is smudged with dirt, pinched at the corners and the spine is creased from use. He has to turn the pages carefully, so that he doesn’t accidentally pull them out where the glue has started to degrade.

He has lost count of how many times he has read it in the past three years.

He pulls the drawstring closed on the bag containing Dolores’ clothes and jewellery box, and then adds it to the pile of clothing and bedding on the wagon. It joins his box of carefully selected books, his two best pans, the kettle, and a large plastic box he found with an intact lid. Inside that, he has stashed all that remains of his supplies (about six days of food, maybe nine if he really rations, and about seven days of water). The supplies should be more than enough to see him to the next town, the one his older self had enthusiastically circled on the map. And nestled snugly amongst all of the food are three jars of coffee.

Because his older self had been right about liking the coffee. After a week of curiosity, he had relented and made himself some coffee, and found that he did at least appreciate the effect of it. Hot, strong, and bitter, a cup of coffee can warm his blood, wake his mind, and soothe his hungry stomach for a little longer.

The wooden wagon he is loading up is an upgrade on his little worn-out trailer. It is wider, and deeper, and can hold more stuff. The wheels are larger, and when he drags it over the uneven and broken terrain, it feels sturdier. The two long handles bracket him like a cart to a horse, but it feels much less likely to turn over than his old trailer with its single handle, and he is much more confident that it won’t spill his belongings everywhere. It is actually large enough that if he really needed too, he could sleep or shelter in it. If he first put the most waterproof of his belongings underneath it, spread his circus tent sheeting over the top and then curled up very tightly to sleep, or shelter temporarily from the weather.

It is tempting to load it high with everything it can carry, but it is as heavy as sin for Five to drag along, especially when the road isn’t smooth, so they are resisting. Or, Five is worrying and restricting everything to the bare essentials, trying to be practical about it. Dolores, on the other hand, is trying to convince him that he doesn’t need to become a complete minimalist, and that taking a couple of comfort items won’t kill them.

Hence, the leave corner system.

Five steps back, dusting his hands off and surveys the wagon, lifting the handles to test the weight and then looking around at what is left of their shelter. Just a few items still need to be loaded, but he needs them for the night, so they will be packed last thing. He nods, pleased with the work and turns to Dolores.

“Well, I think that’s it Dolores. We’re all packed. Tomorrow’s the day.”

He swallows and then busies himself with preparing to sleep in the nest of blankets he will be leaving behind.

“Tomorrow, we’ll leave. Head west.”

* * *

They don’t head out the next day.

Or the day after.

Or even the day after that.

Instead, Five keeps finding small excuses to delay. Maybe that house will have some more water they can take, or perhaps he will find some better boots in that old store. Maybe he should just scavenge for another day or two, build up their food supplies a little bit more. Just in case.

The excuses are paper thin, and as see-through as glass, yet Dolores patiently puts up with him for nearly five days before she snaps, telling him to grow up and stick to his decisions.

So, suitably chastened and nearly a week after his original deadline to leave, he finds himself kneeling in front of his siblings’ cairns not long after daybreak to say his goodbyes. He pulls his pack from his back and takes out the small offerings he has made for each of them.

They each get a wooden plaque with their name on it. He had found an old garage with tins of paint still sealed just as winter had started, and then begun saving the flattest boards of wood he could find. On days where he couldn’t leave due to the weather, he’d sorted through them, keeping only the smoothest and least rotten specimens until he had the six best pieces he could find to paint up.

Six pieces, because whilst he may never have found Ben and Vanya’s bodies, his brothers and sisters deserved to be together in spirit at least.

He gently leans each of their signs against their cairns, laid out around the edge of the glade in numerical order like the face of a clock. They look better than the numbers he had painstakingly scratched into the concrete when he first buried them. He had long ago made small rock piles in the spaces for Ben and Vanya, and he leans their plaques against those, the familiar lump rising in his throat at the reminder of his failure to bring them together.

He sinks down to sit cross-legged in what should be his spot between Klaus and Ben.

“Hey guys.” He sighs.

He uses his finger to draw in the dirt, staring at the shapes as if they hold all the answers.

“I, uh, I’m leaving. Today.” He swallows. “It’s…. it’s time. I know it is, there’s not much left to live on here. And my older selves keep telling me I need to move on, but….”

The wind whistles through the rubble.

“I don’t want to go.” He whispers, biting his lip. “I’m scared. What if I don’t get to the next town soon enough? Or there isn’t enough there?”

Tears start to trickle down his face, and his nose starts to run.

“What if… what if I get lost? I’ve never left this city, ever. What if I have to keep moving on to survive, and I _never get to come back?_ ” He sobs, clamping a hand over his mouth and nose, as if he can stuff the noise back in.

He curses himself for crying, for wasting fluids, even as he tastes the salt and snot on his lips, and feels the stabbing pain in his chest.

“I don’t want to leave you behind! And my older selves keep telling me to leave but they _don’t tell me if I come back again!_ ” He gasps, giving up on holding his sobs in and instead wrapping his arms around himself. He tries to pull in deep breaths instead.

“And what they do tell me is so disjointed! They can tell me that I need to leave, and even that I need to go west, but if they try to tell me what might happen to me they just” –he hiccups and gestures wildly with an arm- “disappear back!”

A deep, shuddering breath. God, Klaus would call him such a wuss if he could see him now, eighteen years old and still crying over the idea of leaving home.

“I’m cursed.” He whispers. “I must be. I think my older selves might be right when they tell me I can’t change the past. I displaced to when I left the academy _again_ last month. Dropped straight into that snowy street, in whatever year it was. I spotted my younger self straight away, and went to jump over to him and then _bam!”_

He smacks his hand against his leg for emphasis.

“-Some idiot bumped right into me on the sidewalk, and sent me flying on the ice. By the time I got up again, my younger self had gone, had jumped forward already.”

He runs a sleeve across his face, wiping away the snot and tears that run miserably down his face.

“I can never seem to get there, can never warn myself. There’s always something that stops me.”

The wind whistles through the silence as Five gets himself back under control.

“I won’t stop trying though. I won’t. I _must_ be falling there for a reason. I need to stop all this from happening. Maybe this would never have happened if I hadn’t left. Maybe you’d all still be alive. Maybe I’d have died with you, rather than be here.”

He sighs.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe.”

* * *

He sits there for maybe an hour, catching his siblings up on what had happened over the winter. He sniffs his way through reminiscing over his favourite memories with each of them from when they were kids. Then he updates them on his progress with his calculations, and describes how he has confirmed the logistics of travelling forward, that how no matter how he looks at it, he jumped forwards correctly when he left. It is not a problem in the jumping forwards that has gotten him stuck; it must be something about the jumping back he hasn’t comprehended yet that is stopping him from using the same technique to return home.

But eventually he can’t ignore the passing of time any longer. The sun is getting higher in the sky, and the longer he delays the more likely it is that he won’t make it to the next town during daylight.

With a shaky sigh he stands, brushing the dust off the seat of his trousers. He picks up his pack and bites his trembling lip, fighting against the tears he can feel welling in his eyes again (he doesn’t know where they’ve come from, he had thought he was all cried out).

“I love you all.” He whispers, gripping tightly the straps of the rucksack. He refuses to say goodbye. It feels too final, even though they are all dead. With a deep breath and a firm nod, he turns sharply on his heel and begins to climb through the rubble piles, forcing himself not to look back as he leaves the Glade.

He passes the familiar burnt out burger van, and turns to follow what used to be a road, treading carefully on the ripped up surface, picking his way over the rubble of collapsed buildings and dodging around old cars.

He knows this area well after five years, but he still drinks it in as he walks, carefully trying to commit the landmarks to memory, trying to determine which spaces are likely to still be clear and free to use as landing points for jumps, if he does ever learn to master going long-distance.

According to the scuffed wristwatch he had found during the winter, it takes roughly half an hour before Five reaches the highway. He thinks it keeps time more or less accurately, although whether it had actually been set correctly at the time of its owner’s death he couldn’t guess. Still, the scuffed and dented analogue had been strapped carefully to his wrist and seldom removed since, a strong sense of comfort to have a more reliable tracking of time than his own limited skill in tracking the path of the sun.

He will miss it when the battery inevitably runs out.

His lips twitch into a smile as he rounds the corner and spots Delores, sat regally and patiently at the front of their wagon. They had gotten up at the crack of dawn and in the dim light he had pulled the wagon across the city to the old highway, before leaving Dolores to keep an eye on their things and making his way alone to spend time with his siblings’ cairns.

He steps up next to her, reaching up to straighten her cheerful bobble hat before slipping his hand into hers and holding tight as he turns his back to the morning sun. The road stretches out into the distance, and he thinks he can see the next town when he squints.

Five years ago he would have thought nothing of the distance, would have scoffed at the suggestion that he might not make it there before nightfall. In fact, he probably would have made it a challenge with his siblings to see who would make it first.

And no matter what Diego or Klaus said, using his powers to overtake his siblings, or to avoid difficult obstacles wouldn’t have been cheating. It would have been making best use of his natural advantages.

But today he does worry about making it before nightfall, because the highway is warped and cracked, and his wagon is large and heavy. Whilst he has camped outside many times now, he has never camped outside in the middle of nowhere, and he would rather not be stranded to sleep on the ground beside his wagon if he doesn’t need to be.

He pulls the folded map out of his pocket with his free hand and double checks his course. His older self had circled the next town and labelled it with notes about where to find plenty of water, and some new camping supplies. The next town after that one apparently has an old wholesaler warehouse that is mostly still standing. His older self had labelled it with a star, saying it was full of canned food - enough to feed him for weeks and weeks without rationing - and he had suggested it would be a good place to hunker down for the next winter. To spend the winter eating well and working on his equations (and not too far away that he couldn’t spare two or three days to come back and visit his siblings’ cairns in the spring). To take the time to really rest, and plan his route westward.

And you know what? Five believes him.

He is beginning to realise his older selves aren’t out to get him, that they are trying to help him in their own way. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to change things himself but… he understands them a bit better now. They are not holding things back from him out of spite, or a vindictive need to see him fail the way they may have done. Sometimes they literally cannot tell him, disappearing back to whenever they came from. Other times he will realise afterwards that no matter what they could have said, he wouldn’t have listened to it. There are just some lessons that he will only learn through bitter experience.

His older selves aren’t like his father. They aren’t there to watch him fail at a test where he hasn’t been told the rules. They are further along on this journey, but they have felt his pain. They know his frustration at the complexities of temporal logic.

They are still figuring the rules out themselves.

“I guess this is it, Dolores.” He says, looking up from the map and giving her hand a squeeze before reluctantly letting go. He carefully folds the map up, and tucks it safely away into his pocket. “Time to go.”

He steps up between the arms of the wagon, grasps them and begins to pull the wagon along the road.

It is a slow and sad start to his journey, but he refuses to look back.

He has to look forward to survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this chapter! Our Five is growing up and 'leaving home' as it were. In the UK 18 is really your coming of age- you can drink, vote, gamble etc. (although our age of consent is 16, so technically a Brit can legally have a child and make decisions on their behalf before they can actually completely legally do that for themselves. Weird system!) and is also usually the age you leave state/mandatory education to either work or go to university. So it felt fitting to me for that to be the time that Five runs out of supplies and has to venture out into the wider apocalyptic world.
> 
> Hopefully be picking up a bit more action in the next chapters, now we've had a chance to recover from Five's fight and brush with death-by-dehydration. I’ve decided I’m going to stop predicting when we’ll hit season 1. We’ll get there when we get there. I’ve found too much story to write before then and I’m still finding more! I hope you like apocalyptic Five, he’s going to be hanging around a bit longer.
> 
> Also I've got to a point where I'm impatient to get to later scenes I've already written and I'm so excited about - there are things I've been trying to weave into these chapters to set up for later scenes and I just want to talk about it and I can't, I have to wait. If you are a writer as well as a reader, do you get this problem too?
> 
> Once again thank you for all the love, kudos, subscriptions, bookmarks etc. and for those of you who have been leaving comments you have my love and gratitude <3 They really have helped. I’ve definitely found some more writing flow this week, although still trying to find a routine! For those of you who possibly could be persuaded to leave a comment in the future – I’m friendly I promise! I’m just a complete chatterbox who wants to talk to people about Umbrella Academy.
> 
> Anyways, as always I'm open to constructive feedback on any aspect of my writing, or to soak up some love or just willing to hand you tissues if the sad gets to you <3
> 
> * * *
> 
> I don't know why AO3 won't let me correctly post links. I try and try to reinstate them but it just keeps removing the href tag until the chapter has been up for 24 hours. So if this link if broken when you read it, try again a day or so later and I should have fixed it.
> 
> This weeks rec is: [Echoes by chiiyo86](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26666533/chapters/65036824)  
>  **Summary:** On the night of November 15, 1963, Allison finds Five passed out in the back alley where she landed two years ago. Together they set out to try and find their siblings, but the task turns out to be more complicated than they imagined...
> 
> More Five time-travel misadventures but this time set in season 2, and focused around giving more screen time to Five and Allison interaction, which is excellent. Recently completed so go check it out :)


	10. Chapter 10

**February 2009. The Umbrella Academy. Klaus’ Room. Five and Klaus are both 19.**

When Five trips over the desk chair and lands sprawled across the carpet he knows exactly where he is.

He swears Klaus leaves that chair out on purpose, purely to fuck with him.

Calling the chair (and his brother), every uncharitable name he can think of, he gets to his hands and knees and reaches under the bed. He stretches his arm out blindly and grabs the bag of mismatched clothes that Klaus keeps hidden for him. Pulling out the items that look adult sized he pulls a face at his limited options.

Does he go for the pair of rather tight looking black jeans and an old academy uniform shirt? Or what looks suspiciously like one of their father’s old suits stolen from the laundry pile?

With a sigh, he resigns himself to the uncomfortable looking jeans, rather than suffer the indignity of having to turn up their father’s trousers at least twice. Five would love to say he still has some way to grow, but he has met his older selves. This is it, he might get another inch or so width across his shoulders, but he won’t be getting any taller, no matter how much he wishes for Klaus’ lofty six feet.

Speaking of the devil, he is just doing an awkward shimmy to pull the jeans over his hips when the door swings open and Klaus crashes in.

“Oh!” Klaus exclaims, his scowl brightening into a teasing grin as he catches sight of Five. “Well, well, if it isn’t my favourite exhibitionist!”

Five yanks the jeans up. “Fuck off Klaus.” He mutters, doing up the fly. Five may have put some pounds back on since venturing out into the wider world of hell and finding new towns to scavenge in, but he is still lean. These jeans are tighter than anything he has worn in his life. Did Klaus really wear these at one point? “That joke was already old by the time we were 12.”

Klaus pats him on the shoulder as he steps past him to flop on the bed. “Oh, Fivey, it’ll never get old. And might I say the skinny jeans and long hair are a _great_ look.” He says, giving Five a teasing look up and down, before hissing and glaring at the space next to him. Five wonders who he is looking at.

“Ghosts?” He asks, stiffly leaning down to pick up the shirt.

Klaus groans. “Just the one. And a real needy soul he is too.” He scowls, sticking his tongue out before he rolls on to his side to face Five, who is buttoning up his shirt. “But enough about me. How about you? How goes the mission to calculate your jumps home? You been visiting the libraries a lot?”

“It’s going shit.” Five sighs, sitting down heavily in the desk chair. “I’ve hit a wall. I _know_ I got it right jumping forwards. I’ve checked all the calculations over and over. But I just can’t figure out how to reverse it so I can jump back. The energy is there, and I know I can make a temporal jump, but I go to make the portal to jump backwards and it just won’t open!”

He props his elbow against the desk and leans his cheek on his fist. “I hate to say it, but dad was right. Time travel is a complete crapshoot.”

“Why don’t you, I dunno-” Klaus says, flailing an arm in the air. “-just study yourself? You zip back and forth all over the timeline without even trying.”

Five stares at him.

“What?” Klaus says affronted, glancing to the side. “It wasn’t that stupid of an idea, was it? I know you think you got all the brains in this family, but I’m not too shabby-”

“I’m such an idiot.” Five says stunned. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

And he is. An idiot that is.

Because it isn’t a genius idea, it’s an obvious one.

Why _hasn’t_ he tried to study himself? Like Klaus says, his body has been bouncing around the timeline, back and forth like a boomerang since he was five years old. It knows how to travel forwards and backwards through time, even if he can’t consciously control it and access it with his power yet.

He turns numbly to the desk and starts scrambling around for a sheet of paper and a pen, jotting down ideas even as his mind is tumbling onto the next question. He blindly reaches up and grasps the ‘Basic theories of time travel’ from the shelf, distractedly flipping through the familiar pages with his own scrawled notes in the margins and some less helpful but more artistic additions from Klaus.

This….could change everything. Not just his ability to get home, but if he actively studies his displacements, if he could mathematically understand them and harness the principles…

…maybe he will be able to stop himself from displacing ever again.

He is jolted out of his thoughts by a lit joint being waved under his nose.

“Yoo-hoo. Earth to Five, come in.” Klaus sing-songs. “Do you want a puff of this or not?”

Five takes it quickly and clamps it between his lips, taking a deep pull. It has been a few years since they have smoked together. Klaus tends to favour the heavier drugs that come in coloured pills and powders in his twenties, and doesn’t hold onto a stash of weed the way he does when he is still at the academy.

He’s missed it, he thinks as he lets out a deep sigh, smoke curling from his nostrils.

“I’m not getting that back am I?” He hears Klaus mutter to himself as he turns away to light himself a fresh joint. Five’s lips twitch into a smile and he sets himself back to his notes, Klaus humming to himself in the background.

A little while later, after the joint is finished and Five has begun to jot down ideas of which principles might apply to his displacements, he is startled from his train of thought by the ringing of the mission alarm.

Klaus jack-knifes off the bed. “Aw, shit. Noooooo.” He swings his legs over the side and hunts for his combat boots, hurriedly shoving his feet in them. “Sorry Five, I best answer that. Luther will come up here and have my ass if I don’t.”

“It’s fine.” Five waves distractedly, mind already turning back to his calculations. “Have fun.”

Klaus snorts. “Oh yeah, sure. Whatever.” He leans past Five to grab his domino mask from the back of the desk, and then swoops down and lands a noisy, exaggerated kiss on the side of his face. Five startles and leans away, train of thought lost and hand coming up to touch the damp patch on his cheek. Gross.

“Don’t wait up for me honey!” Klaus cackles as he bounds out of the door.

_What a lunatic._

Five thinks, rubbing at his cheek. Still, he realises deep down that it feels good to get that small bit of teasing affection from his brother.

***

It is about half an hour later when Five begins to feel the itch in his belly that signals that he is going to rebound soon. With a huff, he stands and marches over to the bed, lifting the mattress and pulling out Klaus’ stash of weed. The old battered tin sits open on the windowsill with papers and matches, and he looks out at the alleyway behind the mansion as his hands try to remember how to roll a joint. He and Klaus have smoked together a few times, but Klaus has only shown him how to roll it himself once, back when he was 15.

Sweeping the mess back into the tin, he puts the joint between his lips and strikes a match to light it. He is just sucking in a glorious lungful when a knock sounds at the door, and the hinges creak as the door is opened.

Five spins around to see Pogo at the door, and his heart aches a little as seeing him looking much as he had in Five’s childhood, except for the addition of the little gold half-moon glasses perched on his nose.

“Master Five.” He even sounds the same, even down to the chiding tone as he stares disapprovingly at the joint.

Five takes another drag. “Pogo.” His feelings about Pogo are…complicated. He never really knows _what_ to feel about him, or what his role in Five’s life should have been. There is certainly no love lost between Five and his Father, and whilst he certainly likes Grace and appreciates her, and may call her ‘Mom’ from time to time, he has never really loved her. Not the way he thinks you are meant to love your mom. Not like Diego, Ben and Vanya all did.

Pogo though? Pogo was mostly their teacher, but also part butler, and part something else. And Five has never been able to figure out what that something else was, and it always left something of a barrier between them when Five was a child.

He thinks that maybe he did want to love Pogo, but he just wasn’t sure how he was meant to.

“It is good to see you again, Master Five.”

“It’s…good to be back.” Five says, unsure if he is lying or not.

“I’m afraid Sir Hargreeves has requested your presence in his study.” Pogo says, and for a second he does look regretful, before the shadow passes and his usual pleasant, but slightly solemn, expression returns.

Five sighs, and picks up the mug Klaus uses as ashtray to take with him. He doesn’t care what his father says, he’s not letting a good joint go to waste.

“Well, we’d best not keep him waiting then.” He mutters.

***

Five absently follows Pogo into his father’s study, mug and joint still firmly in his hands and his mind occupied with running over the variables of studying his own displacements. He is only brought back to the present when his father clears this throat.

“Number Five.” He says sharply, brows drawn into a frown as he gives Five an assessing look through his monocle. He looks _exactly_ how Five remembers him. “What on earth is that dreadful scruff doing on your face?”

Five snorts. He would have thought the old man would have been more offended by the smoke than his rather pathetic attempt at a beard. “Protection from the elements.” He takes a pull of the joint, holding the smoke in his lungs before letting it out in a slow, satisfied sigh. Pogo’s nose wrinkles as he shuffles around Five and excuses himself from the room, gently closing the door behind him.

“Not like there are many razors in the end of the world either.” He mutters under his breath, unable to stop it slipping out, but sure it is quiet enough that his father won’t hear.

He’s wrong. “The end of the world?” His father’s gaze sharpens, fixed on his face. “So you actually managed it, you foolish child. You travelled forwards – to beyond the catastrophic event?”

Five stares, too shocked at the thought that his father _knows about the end of the world_.

“Sit down, Number Five.” His father barks, gesturing to the chair in front of the desk. “There is much we need to discuss. And put that out, surely that disgusting drug has settled the Nuisance Side Effect by now?”

Five grits his teeth but stubs out the remainder of the joint inside the umbrella mug, reminding himself it is not worth the argument – what can his Father do to him anyway when he’ll soon be gone, back to the future? He steps forward and sits down sharply, putting the mug directly onto the polished wood desk with a clatter, and enjoying how his father’s eyelid twitches.

When Five was seven years old, their father had discovered his displacement problem. Or, as he called it, the Nuisance. Before that, Five hadn’t disappeared very many times, nor had he gone missing for long. In fact, most of the time when he had been young he had vanished in his sleep, and usually been back in time for breakfast. It hadn’t been difficult to keep it unnoticed at first, even with six siblings, cameras, a robot mom and Pogo.

But it had been hard to hide it once he vanished right from underneath his father’s nose, leaving his clothes in a pile at his father’s feet during the middle of special training.

He no longer remembers just what in particular he had been being scolded for at the time. But he does remember how his body had ached with exertion, the stinging of tears in his eyes and the way his gut had churned before he was suddenly naked and emptying his stomach in the alleyway behind the mansion. A teenaged version of himself had been climbing down the fire escape from Klaus’ room, in a pair of jeans and a too-large sweater. His older self had clicked his tongue in annoyance and climbed back up to Klaus’ room, before throwing down an academy uniform for him to dress in when he realised that young Five didn’t have the energy to jump up to the window.

He had then been whisked away for a few hours to practice his lock picking, and learn about breaking and entering the normal, non-powered way, because ‘as you’ve learnt, we don’t always land with the energy to jump around, but we will always need clothes’.

When he returned to his normal time, he found out that he had only been gone for a few minutes from his father’s perspective. But that few minutes was long enough to escalate his discipline from a scolding to the cane, the strokes separated by his father’s questions about where (and then when) he had been.

At first, his father called it a ‘fascinating development’ in his power.

He had quickly changed his tune when he realised it wasn’t something that could be harnessed for his control. _Then_ it became highly inconvenient that Five was predisposed to disappearing without warning, or hint of when he might return.

And that was why, on his eight birthday, Five found himself taken aside and presented with a pill bottle by a pleasantly smiling Grace, and a frowning Pogo. He then spent the next sixth months taking various medications on his father’s orders, in an attempt to eliminate the nuisance of his involuntary jumps. Some made him feel heavy and sluggish; others made him strangely removed from what went on around him. He thinks the worst ones might have been when he felt normal, except for the hollow feeling in his gut. But it didn’t matter how he felt, he couldn’t skip the pills. Not when Grace came to his room every morning before breakfast to supervise him taking his ‘medicine’.

Nearly all the drugs his father tried had succeeded in anchoring him in the present.

The problem? They had also anchored him spatially.

And not having his powers had sucked royally.

Apparently, six months was the longest their Father could stand to have his powers drugged into uselessness, because he stopped the trials. He had told Five quite firmly he was disappointed in the results, but that the curing of the Nuisance Side Effect (as his Father had taken to calling it) was not worth the lack of his powers.

Five had hated to agree with him on anything, but in this, he had been relieved.

He is pulled from his thoughts by his father’s voice.

“So, Number Five. Precisely what year in the future did you land?”

Five stares.

“Stop gawping like a fish Number Five, we don’t have time for it. Answer the question.”

And, well, why the hell shouldn’t he?

Maybe if he tells his father, then maybe the team can stop whatever it is that ends the world. For all his faults, their father is not a stupid man. Maybe this warning is what they need to survive.

He swallows. “2019. April, 2019.” He says hoarsely, fingers gripping his thighs tightly, his whole body tense.

His father leans over his leather bound journal, pen moving swiftly to record Five’s answers. The same journal that had haunted all of his personal training sessions as a child. “And the date?”

“The second. I think.”

His father looks up sharply. “You think?”

“Well, there was nobody around to ask.” Five licks his lips, mouth dry even as his palms sweat. He is… actually passing on information from the future, _about_ the future. He isn’t choking on his words, or being waylaid by coincidences, or rebounding from his displacement before he can speak. “The last newspaper I could find was dated April first.”

His father nods, resuming his note taking. “And the conditions?”

“Hell.” Five whispers, gaze set on the wall behind his father’s shoulder. “It was like landing in the fires of hell.”

His father hums and gestures for him to continue.

“The air was full of smoke, and there were still fires burning in the rubble.” Five tries to stop his knee from jiggling up and down, but he can’t. He forces his fingers to uncurl instead, and wipes his sweaty palms down his jeans. “All the buildings are destroyed. No survivors.”

“And you have no idea what caused it?”

“None.”

“Hmmm. How old are you now, Number Five?”

Five shakes his head slightly. “I’m not entirely sure.”

“Your best guess then.”

“About nineteen.” The longer he stays in the future the more difficult it is to try to keep track of his age. Should he be factoring in the hours and days he lives whilst he is displaced, or not?

“And did you time travel to the catastrophic event directly? Or did you take multiple jumps until you got yourself stuck?”

Five tries not to squirm at the level of knowing in his father’s gaze. “Multiple jumps.” He mutters, looking to the side as his cheeks burn. He feels like he is nine years old again and his father is dissecting all of his mistakes in front of Luther and Diego after a team training exercise.

He jumps at the clap of the journal being closed.

“You are dismissed, Number Five.”

Five blinks, then picks up Klaus’ mug and stands, stomach rumbling as he leaves. He walks downstairs, not bothering to dodge cameras for once. He can hear humming, and when he enters the kitchen Grace is cleaning dishes at the sink.

“Oh! Five dear.” She turns with a smile. “How wonderful to see you. I’ve missed you. It’s been 6 years, 2 months, and 24 days since you left.”

“Hey mom.” Five sighs, collapsing into a chair and taking an apple from the fruit bowl at the centre of the table. “How are you doing?” He asks through a mouthful.

“I am well thank you, although it is quieter around the academy, what with so few of you around anymore!” Grace says brightly, leaving the sink and moving to the fridge. “You look hungry dear, shall I make you something to eat?”

“Please.” Five says, and then frowns. “Wait, few of us around? Who has left?”

He can vaguely remember the far-off daydreams of leaving the academy before he ran away, but he can’t remember that feeling anymore. He had never thought that attempting to flex his powers would take him away from home, had simply thought he could jump to the future, enjoy himself for a bit and be back in time for dinner.

He can’t quite capture that feeling of wanting to leave (relative) safety anymore.

Grace cracks eggs in to a pan on the stove. “Well, Diego left two weeks ago to join the police academy, where I’m sure he is going to do so well. Allison moved out two months ago to pursue her career. Did you know she is an actress now, Five dear? And our Vanya, well she left over a year ago. She is studying music at the conservatoire now; she has gotten so very good with her violin.”

She turns around and pours a glass of water, setting it down in front of a dazed Five. “Don’t forget to hydrate dear, you look peaky.” She says, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead. “Temperature is normal. Perhaps the food will perk you up!” She says brightly, going back to making a cooked breakfast, the smell of bacon filling the kitchen.

Five’s stomach grumbles again, and he rubs it absently as he mulls over what he has learnt.

Half of his siblings have left home. It must just be Klaus, Luther and Ben running missions now. He tries to reconcile what he now knows with the bodies he had found. Allison, with her blond curls and painted nails had looked glamourous enough under the dust to be an actress. He tries to imagine what she sounds like, what types of characters she might play, but fails, his mind only conjuring up the high pitched and slightly bossy tones of their childhood.

Diego had been wearing his knife harness when he died, although it had been empty. And his outfit had been all black – was he a special police agent of some kind? Perhaps because of his powers, they let him carry his knives rather than the standard gun and baton that Five had usually seen the police carry on their missions.

Vanya is easy to imagine. The many hours of practice in their childhood, he knew what she looked like with her beloved violin under her chin, and thanks to the photo on her book he knows she grew out the bangs.

God he would love to hear her play again, even just one more time.

One day, he really hopes he displaces to one of her concerts.

“Here you go dear, you eat up now.” Grace smiles, sliding a plate in front of him.

And for the first time in a very long time, Five tucks into a home cooked breakfast, something in his soul soothed by the familiar smiling face of eggs and bacon, and his belly satisfied by the fluffy pancakes.

Once he finishes, he snags himself a handful of blueberries from the side, which he savours as he makes his way through the silent house back to Klaus’ room. It is only when he sits down at the desk again that he realises, the house is empty – there won’t be anybody wanting to use the bathroom for a few hours. With a smile, he steals Klaus’ comb and lifts his bathrobe from the back of the door, before making his way down the corridor to the bathroom.

He is having a bath, and there isn’t anybody going to stop him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes about the chapter**  
>  And that, my dear readers, is how Reggie knew when to off himself. Hope you enjoyed our boy getting to hang out with Klaus, and our guest appearances by Reggie, Pogo and Grace! Hopefully this was a little bit lighter on the emotional punches for y’all – I tweaked the ending to be a bit more positive after so many of you said your hearts were broken in the last two chapters. Shout out to KimbaSprite – hope you liked the nod to your suggestion of Klaus cracking many nudist/exhibitionist jokes at Five’s expense over the years.
> 
> And just to make sure I’m 100% clear with you guys there are noooo romantic feelings between Klaus and Five and there will never be in this story – the kiss on the cheek was Klaus teasing his far too serious brother (but also lowkey trying to get some affection in when he doesn’t know if Five would take a hug). 
> 
> **Update information**  
>  Heads up that I won’t be posting a new chapter of TTL next weekend, the next chapter will be the first weekend of 2021 instead. However! Make sure you are subscribed to the TTL series, as over the next week I will be putting up a part 3 to the series which will a couple of TTL oneshots that are more light-hearted side stories for you to enjoy.
> 
>  **Love**  
>  Thank you all so much for your love for this fic <3 I’m writing a story that I want to see and read, but a huge part of the joy for me is sharing it and seeing that other people enjoy it too. TTL hit 200 kudos this week, and there have left some amazing comments on the last couple of chapters, and I’m absolutely buzzing with it, thank you!
> 
> Whilst I’ve read (a lot), I have never written any fic before this year, and this is only my second fic ever, so on the last update for 2020 I’d just like to say thank you for being such a supportive and encouraging fandom. <3
> 
> * * *
> 
> This week’s fic rec is: [ Don't You Think About Tomorrow by OverlyObsessed223](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26631706)  
>  **Summary:** “Well, we do all look very different than we did two decades ago,” the man in the hoodie rolls his eyes. “Of course he’s not going to recognize us.” The others ignore him, which Klaus thinks is quite rude, but he’s not going to say as much and risk getting stabbed. 
> 
> AU where Klaus runs away from home when he's ten-years-old—just a few months later, his fully grown siblings fall out of a portal in the sky. It’s a lovely young-Klaus story and there’s all the family feels, angst and misunderstandings we like for our favourite ‘brellas.


	11. Chapter 11

**Early winter 2025. Five is 19.**

Five didn’t get to see Klaus again after his bath.

Whatever mission his brother had been whisked away on had taken longer than the few hours than Five had managed to stay in the past. The high from the weed had kept him in the past for a while, suspended in the feeling of the whole-body itch you get right before you let out a huge sneeze. Uncomfortable, but worth it, he had thought as he grazed on the extra fruit that he had blinked down to the kitchen to steal. He had carried on working on his calculations, Klaus’ permanent markers being used to scrawl important numbers on the skin of his arms.

Part of him had hoped that he wouldn’t need the numbers, that he would rebound into a changed future. One where his information had saved the day, the world no longer looked like hell, and home was only a series of long distance jumps away. A world where his siblings were all there waiting and happy to see him, regardless of the fact he would be ten years behind them in age.

The practical side of him had managed to argue through his mellow high that it was worth running the numbers, because who knew if being able to travel backwards could still help in some way even with the apocalypse averted. He had tried not to think about the faint possibility that he would still need the numbers for the exact same reason he had been needing them for the past six years.

He’d tried.

Really.

But positive thinking had never changed reality before, and it hasn’t this time, he thinks as he stares around at the familiar barren and rubble-strewn landscape of hell, shivering as the winter wind whips past and cuts at his bared skin.

His wordless scream echoes back to him as he kicks at an old piece of wood and sends it bouncing away to splinter into pieces. He sinks to his knees with a sob, uncaring at the cold ground nipping at his legs or the pain in his foot, curling down until his forehead is pressed to the ground. His scalp is stinging as he screams into his knees, and it takes him a second to realise it is his own hands tangled into his hair and pulling at it.

So, he tugs harder – something in his tight and gasping chest just crying out for the pain to hurt as much on the outside as it does on the inside.

Nothing has changed.

Nothing at-fucking-all. His family are still all dead. The world is still gone.

Five is still a failure.

So, he just… lets it out. He hasn’t cried since the day he left his sibling’s cairns and started this journey west. He _never_ cries in front of Dolores. But she’s not here right now, she should be sat in their shelter, down the street where he’d left her when he had nipped out to go to the privy pile before he displaced. Hopefully if he hasn’t been gone too long, the campfire will still be burning, and she’ll be warm enough.

The wind howls with him, as if echoing his pain. He slams his fist onto the ground, and screams and screams into his knees, chest heaving and nose quickly blocking up.

And eventually his screams give way to choked, snotty sobs, his heaving and shuddering turning to shivers. He staggers to his nearly-numb feet, about to use his arm to wipe his snot covered lip when he spots the numbers penned onto his arm.

He stares stupidly for a second, stunned.

He wasn’t quite sure that it would work – nothing ever goes through displacements with him. His clothes, or his hair ties, or even stitches in wounds when he was younger. There is a reason some of his larger scars are particularly gnarly, because they busted open when the stitches disappeared and after that if something was _bad_ then Grace just went straight to cauterisation.

But the numbers he wrote down in Klaus’ room are still there, stark against his wind-whipped red skin.

He sniffles to try and stem his running nose.

Well then.

From now on he will definitely be stealing pens every time he displaces and goes to a library.

And just like that, a calm settles over him again. Except maybe it’s not really calm, and actually more of a numbness. But he’ll take it. He begins to look for the puddle of clothes he left behind when he first displaced back to Klaus, and finds them only a couple of metres away. With cold, clumsy fingers he drags on his layers, fumbling with the buttons and then shoving his icy feet into boots that are just as cold. He pulls the laces tight and stuffs them down the sides - there’s no way he’ll be able to tie them with his stiff and shaking fingers, and it’s not that far to walk.

When he makes it back to their shelter and ducks in, he is greeted by the comforting glow of the fire, and the warm air that hangs around it. He quickly spins and fumbles to replace the door, trying not to let out any of the heat. It looks like he was actually gone for a very short amount of time – he doesn’t even need to add wood to the fire yet, he realises with relief, sinking to his knees as close to the flames as he dares, reaching out to warm his palms.

His teeth chatter. “H-hey Dolores.” He winces, hoping she doesn’t notice the croak in his voice after his breakdown. She worries so much about him, too much about him, and it’s not fair to her.

He clears his throat. “So, ah, we might have had a breakthrough today.” He glances across to where she is perched as close to the fire as they dare. She gets cold so easily, but their winter evenings routine is well rehearsed by now. A few hours by the fire in the evening where Five might work on some calculations, or sorting out their supplies, or planning where to go next with the map. Then, once they are both warm and sleepy, they climb into the nest of blankets and sleeping bags that they call a bed. Five will curl up at her back and hug her warm body against his chest until he drifts off to sleep.

He thinks this might be what Dolores’ romance novels refer to as ‘spooning’.

“From Klaus of all people.” He pauses to chuckle. “Yeah, I know. I was surprised too. And I felt like such an idiot when he suggested it, because it’s just so obvious!” He moves to sit down properly, knees sore from kneeling, dragging his feet round in front of him to sit cross-legged.

And so, he starts to tell her about Klaus’ suggestion to study his own displacements, and his own ideas about where to start, and what it could mean. He definitely doesn’t tell her about his meeting with his father, and carefully buries the thought of how he didn’t change anything despite himself. Dolores is all he has left here.

He can’t let her know what a failure he really is.

* * *

**Summer 2027. Five is about 21.**

His older selves were right, Five muses as he and Dolores sit together on the end of the wagon.

Leaving his home city has been good for them. Over the last three years spent journeying vaguely west, he has eaten better than he ever did in their first few years in hell. He and Dolores spend the spring and summer months as nomads, moving from town to town as the resources dictate rather than trying to make resources stretch.

Five… actually kind of likes it.

He didn’t think he would. He thought that he would hate every mile he put between himself and his siblings’ cairns. And he does. He does hate the distance. But… there is still some beauty left in this hell. The further he goes the less damage there is, although he still cannot figure out what caused the apocalypse in the first place. The roads are less ripped up, the buildings looking more like old, abandoned buildings rather than demolition sites. There are even interesting bits of architecture that have survived.

There is even some grass now.

Grass!

Just little shoots here and there, some moss now and then. Five still hasn’t seen a tree that is still alive - but he has hope now that maybe he will, someday.

There are new things to see and a sense of freedom that he can just… go where he pleases. He is headed west, because his older selves had suggested it, and the older they get the better fed they seem to be. So, on all accounts it seems like a good idea.

They are between towns right now. They left a big town two days ago and are meandering their way to the next using country roads, moving farmstead to farmstead instead of following the curve of the highway.

So sue him, this route is more likely to have more grass, maybe some other plants. And he likes that, even if it is a pain in the ass to drag the wagon down some of the more deteriorated roads. It’s really not a practical decision.

Still, it’s not like they are in a rush to be anywhere.

“So, Dolores.” Five says, turning to reach into the back of the wagon. “Are we going for the red, or the white today?”

He holds both bottles of wine up for her to see. The farmhouse is too derelict for them to stay in, an old wooden cabin that was probably on its last legs even before the apocalypse struck. But when Five had poked around earlier in the day he’d seen signs of an outdoor cellar or storm shelter, and decided to try using his powers to jump into it when he couldn’t move the fallen beam off the sunken door. And whoever had lived here had liked their wine.

Like, really liked their wine.

He has been experimenting with his powers again recently. Not living in a state of constant hunger anymore seems to have done wonders for them – it is slowly getting easier and easier to jump longer distances. Using his portals to transport items he can’t reach out of the rubble is like child’s play. In fact, for all his fears about leaving his home city, this is the first year he hasn’t made the journey back to his siblings Cairns in spring.

Making that decision had _hurt_. But he has travelled so far out now that even with his improving long distance jumping it still takes more and more time to make the journey each year. He can’t just daisy chain the long jumps together, hopping from one to another. They are tiring, each one drains at his reserves and he needs to rest. Catch his breath. The further the jump, the longer the rest and planning the trip home is like a juggling act to cover enough distance but leave time to recover, and plan which towns he remembers well enough to make a jump too, and where he left some food stashes. Last year it took him two days to make the trip back to his hometown, and another two to make it back to where he had been living.

Plus, he can’t carry Dolores with him yet. Not on such a long trip.

He hates leaving her behind.

He can barely take a bag with a bottle of water and some cans of soup to keep himself fed, the more he carries the harder the jumps are. Whilst he rests his powers between jumps, he often scavenges the towns, bringing back any water, alcohol, or food he can find and making a stash to keep himself fed on future jumps. The more he can store, the less he needs to carry. The less he carries, the easier the jumps are, and the quicker he recovers. He is thinking long term here, with his own little apocalyptic bunkers.

Yes, the irony isn’t lost on him.

“The red?” He checks with Dolores. “Okay then, good choice.” He says, putting the white back into the wagon and digging out his pocketknife to deal with the cork. He settles into the curve of her arm, and he slings his right arm around her shoulders in return, the neck of the wine bottle clenched in his left as he takes a pull.

“Oh, that’s a really good choice.” He murmurs, letting it sit on his tongue for a moment before swallowing. It is a pleasant evening – with each passing year the seasons are settling, not quite into the patterns and ideals he remembers from his childhood, but at least into something where each season is distinct from the others, beyond knowing it is winter because it can snow. And this summer evening is warm and hazy after a hot day, the occasional breeze causing the wagon’s cover to flap and Five’s hair to blow across his face.

The sunset is beautiful. The sky overhead is darkening to a midnight blue, whilst the horizon shines golden. The glow from the sun is bright orange, like peel of perfectly ripe fruit, mixed with pinks and reds that remind him of Graces’ skirts and lipstick respectively.

“I think,” He says carefully, after they have sat and watched the sun sink lower and lower until the sky is all deep navy, dark purples and just a red glow along the distant horizon. “-that I might need to start practicing time jumps again soon.”

He can feel the weight of her attention. She seems surprised – not that he can blame her. He hasn’t spoken with her about his calculations and time travel theories for many months now. Not after that time he snapped at her – frustrated at how his numbers had seemed to go round and round in circles, and his progress had been slower than he had hoped for, even in a worst-case scenario. He had just… snapped. Like a rubber band stretched too far and for too long in the cold, and gone brittle from the stress.

He had said some ugly things.

They hadn’t spoken for three days afterward, until Five’s temper had finally, finally cooled off enough for him to realise what an ass he had been. Dolores, the wonderful soul that she is, had waved off his apology before he could even speak it, eyeing him up when he came shuffling over, fingers twisting together, toes dragging in the dirt and his tongue wetting his lips several times over. Cut him off with an indulgent ‘Apology accepted’ and then never spoken of it since, like it had never even happened.

She knows him far, far too well.

God, he doesn’t deserve her.

“But I’m going to need a way to track how long I’m gone before I try.” He says, frowning as he takes another pull of the wine. “The watch is okay, if I can be sure I only travelled a couple of hours, but if I end up jumping a few days ahead it would be useful to know how many days I’ve skipped. I guess I’d know if I jumped weeks – but it’s all fine having theories about how it all works, I’m never going to know if which, if any, of my theories actually hold water if I can’t measure the results.”

“Well shit, don’t I sound just like Dad.” Comes a voice in the dark. Five blinks next to the wagon, fists raised ready (and his wine bottle still clenched in his left, he realises a second later). He relaxes as another Five climbs up from where he was sprawled in the dirt, trying to brush the dust from his rear. Five sighs, rolls his eyes and takes another pull from his bottle.

“Yeah, well, he was a crap father, but he knew his science.” He says, walking back to the wagon and loosening the ropes holding the cover across it. “So, I’ll take that as a sign I’m thinking along the right tracks.” He says, pulling out a long coat and tossing it over to his older self, who catches it with both arms and pulls a face at the smell.

“Jesus. Guess you haven’t found the river yet then.” His older self mutters, shrugging it on. Five hops back up next to Dolores and waves at him with the bottle, other arm already snaking back around Dolores.

“River? How old are you?” He squints through the gloom. He should dig out his wind-up camping lantern (he secretly can’t believe it’s survived this long, somebody had bought themselves the good stuff), but this sounds more interesting – and it’s not like he’s afraid of the dark.

What is there to be afraid of, when there is nothing else out there?

His older self rubs at his jaw with a grimace. “Not much older than you I think – 22, 23 maybe?” He leans up against the wagon. “Hey Dolores, nice blouse.”

“There’s a river?” Five says wonderingly. “Where?”

It feels like a novelty. It rains here in hell, of course it does, and it snows in the winter so the water must go _somewhere_. But Five has been sticking to what was formerly civilisation, afraid to venture away from where he can get resources and have some reasonable idea of where he is on a map. He has seen plenty of dirty puddles (he only drank from them twice when he was younger, before he learnt his lesson. Being sick in the apocalypse is no joke), and some of the drainage systems still work, so he’s seen running water that you could technically call a river. Where the rest of it goes has been a mystery, one that he hasn’t really wasted the time to consider all that much.

But this sounds different, something in the way his older self has said it brings to his mind the picture of clear water, like a forest stream or something.

“There’s a reason our older selves always said to go west. You think that starting to see grass is a coincidence?” His older self chuckles. Five bristles, he hates it when they condescend. His older selves have more _experience_ than him, not more _intelligence_. “No, no. If you carry on this way and drop into the valley you’ll find it. _Please_ go find it, you stink, and Dolores deserves to have some clean clothes.” Which Five thinks is a bit harsh. It’s not his fault he hasn’t displaced for a couple of weeks and been able to sneak in a bath or even a quick wash over a sink. He has found bars of soap here in hell, but it’s the water he can’t spare.

His older self gestures for the wine bottle, and Five hands it over absently, already daydreaming about being able to wash himself and their clothes. He watches his older self take a long pull, holding the wine in his mouth with both a wince and satisfied expression.

“You don’t like it?”

“Oh no, this is the good stuff. I remember the cellar this came from, you should make sure to check the back - there is a beautiful bottle of Bordeaux in there. Dolores, you’re gonna love it.” He hands back the wine, rubbing again at his jaw. “Nah it’s just this fucking wisdom tooth. Thought maybe I got lucky and wasn’t going to get any. Kept hoping for it anyway. But this one decided to start cutting through maybe a month ago and it’s an absolute bitch.”

Five winces. Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.

“Anyway, best set up camp on the floor and not in the wagon tonight, I’m not going anywhere any time soon so I might as well get some sleep and we won’t both fit in the wagon.”

Five sighs and checks how much is left of his bottle.

Dental trouble. Sometimes he really hates knowing about the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy new year! Hopefully 2021 brings better things to all. Anybody got any good resolutions? I’ve only made one – to finish this fic!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the little related oneshots over the holidays (if you haven’t seen them, there is now a part 3 to the series called ‘Tripping through time’) and I hope you enjoyed this chapter.
> 
> Thank you all for your continued love and support for this story. Because I've mentioned the wonderful comments a lot in the last few chapter notes, I’m dedicating this chapter to all the silent readers who may not have commented but have left kudos or bookmarks, or subscribed to this story to show support. Thank you so much, however you show your support for this story <3
> 
> Also, I made to it tumblr - @LittleRit if you want to say hello!
> 
> * * *
> 
> This week’s fic rec is: [Wet n' Wild by hothead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25406176)  
>  **Summary:**  
>  “I went down to the river and I sat down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, so I jumped in and then I sank.” (Diego discovers a new power. It does not go well.)
> 
> A great 10k oneshot about how Diego discovers his secondary power on a mission as kids. Lots of emotions and little moments between siblings.


	12. Chapter 12

**Early March 2010. Five is 22. Vanya is 20.**

Five is not above theft.

Whether that is stealing clothes from a store when he ends up displaced away from the Academy, or lifting wallets from strangers, or using his powers to teleport a few bucks out of the cash register and into his pockets when waiting impatiently in line for a coffee.

Getting coffee is a relatively new pleasure. Five hadn’t realised that coffee shops were a thing, or that there were even get different _types_ of coffee, until a year or so ago when he’d displaced to a tired looking Klaus. His brother had taken one look at his face and clearly seen a kindred spirit, before dragging him off to a coffee shop.

He was also the one who gave Five the idea of paying for said coffees with money stolen out of the cash register, after he had admitted halfway through the line that he didn’t have a dollar to his name.

Sitting in the shop to drink said coffee is too much though. When the shop is busy, the act of just standing in line nearly overwhelms him - being boxed in by people, with the hustle and bustle of life and the constant _noise_ around him makes his arms itch and palms sweat. By the time he gets to the front, it is all he can do to spit out his order (“Coffee, black!”) and try to exchange money without touching a stranger’s hands.

The idea of touching somebody he doesn’t know, who is warm and alive, shouldn’t make his chest as tight and wheezy as it does. But after spending his first few weeks in the apocalypse surrounded by corpses, patting them down for anything useful in their pockets (and, before they had seriously started to decompose, stealing their clothes and shoes) something in his very soul cringes when he accidentally brushes against warm skin.

Klaus is different. Klaus should always be warm, and alive, and bouncing, and free. When he gets to displace back to his brother, he soaks up Klaus’ touch and presence like a sponge, as if by collecting enough of his warmth he can use it to dispel the memory of being stupid and 13. Of kneeling in the dirt at his brother’s side, holding his pale grey hand and crying, his fingers tracing the cold goodbye tattoo over, and over. As if getting enough of Klaus’ many smiles means that he can forget gently closing the staring eyes of his brother’s corpse, wipe away the memory of straining to help two of his older selves to lift and carry what siblings he could find across the rubble, and to their final resting places.

Anyways, coffee. Preferably double-shot, to give him an extra buzz by the time he hits the library and starts pulling out all the quantum theory books he can find. Always black, definitely no sugar (he misses it too much when he ends up back in the apocalypse and is back to straight coffee granules and water heated over a campfire). Klaus had tried to get him to experiment once, and he had reluctantly tried a latte. It did not go down well.

That is a lie. It went down _very_ well, with the bitterness tempered by the milk.

But let’s just say that the milk had _not_ agreed with his body, as he spent the next few hours curled up on a park bench in agony as Klaus rubbed his back in solidarity, asking him why he hadn’t just _said_ he was lactose intolerant, rather than letting Klaus bully him to try something other than black coffee.

Five’s not sure whether it was a blessing or a curse that he got to ride out the other consequences of his lactose misadventure in the past, his misery compounded by sitting in the cold stall of a particularly disgusting public bathroom. He had consoled himself with the thought that least he had toilet paper, and somewhere to wash his hands after it was all over, even if he didn’t have any privacy. Not with Klaus outside the door, pinching his nose and trying to keep up a cheerful commentary and making Donald-duck impressions to distract Five from his woes.

Still, all of that isn’t enough to put him off getting himself a coffee whenever he finds himself dropped into the past without Klaus anywhere nearby. Today is no different, as he leaves the bustling shop with relief, his takeaway cup warming his hand as he turns and begins to march down the street towards the college library.

It’s a cold morning, with frost sparkling on the streetlamps and his breath misting in front of him. The air feels clean, and the smell of his coffee seems extra sharp. The streets are busy, with the rumble of traffic and people hurrying about their business. He absently dodges around people, his mind furiously running over his calculations, revising where the holes are that he had been waiting to get a library trip to fix.

He had been so, _so_ close to taking a risk and trying to jump forward again, fed up at his lack of progress despite having no way to reliably track how far he’d jumped. Then he had taken one last glance at his notes.

And noticed a mistake.

A freakin’ mistake. At some point, he had smudged a number in his notebook, and lost the last digit. It apparently hadn’t mattered at the time, as he’d carried the correct number to finish off that set - but when he’d later gone back and picked up that variable for a whole different loop of calculations…

Well.

That careless little mistake has cost him nearly a full workbook worth of calculations, because they nearly all rely on that variable and are no longer correct. And, if he has made such a stupid mistake in such a simple section… where else has he fucked up? Safer to start it all afresh, checking, checking, and checking again as he goes along. The complexity of the math and interdependencies of the equations make it too big of a task to try to untangle the consequences of his carelessness.

A beginner’s error. He can’t believe he hadn’t picked it up sooner.

Still, if he makes sure that he gets this right then really, what is the rush? In theory, time will be at his fingertips. If he can drop back into the time stream whenever he chooses, then he has all the time in the world. When he cracks it, he can jump right back to where he needs to be after all.

His concentration breaks as he bumps into someone, his shoulder jerking back and a hot wet feeling down his lower leg and foot as he drops his coffee. He sucks an annoyed breath in through his teeth at the sting. “Shit!”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry-” The woman ducks down, trying to gather loose papers back into the folder she dropped. “-I wasn’t looking where I was going, and-”

“V-Vanya?” Five whispers.

“-well I can buy you a new coffee?” She straightens up, adjusting the stap of the violin case so it sits square her shoulder.

And Five just stares, the rapidly cooling wet patch on his trousers (and the decimation of his precious coffee) completely forgotten.

Because it _is_ Vanya. He would know her face anywhere, even if he has never seen her this age before. The round cheeks he remembers from their childhood have melted away, and her face is pale under her bangs, with just a red dash on the end of her nose from the cold. There is a short pencil that she has obviously forgotten about tucked behind her ear, just like she used to do when she practiced violin for independent study.

“Um, are you okay?” She says, biting her lower lip.

Five gives himself a shake. “Uh, fine. Fine!” He squeaks, his throat suddenly tight. He bites down on the inside of his cheek to fight against the tell-tale sting in his eyes. No, no crying here. Nope, nope, nope.

She doesn’t seem to be quite convinced, glancing quickly at his face before fiddling with the folder and finally tucking it under her arm. “Are you sure? Look, I can get you another coffee, I’m so sorry-”

“Yes.” He breathes, all of his library plans forgotten. He can’t stop himself from staring, trying to commit to memory all the changes. And it is strange, because all of these years he has always pictured her as being taller than him, because she had an inch or two height on him when he ran away, and he really hasn’t grown much taller since. But here she is, only an inch or so shorter than him at most, like she didn’t grow any taller at all, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail like she can’t decide if she’s still trying to hide behind her bangs or not.

Her faces lightens a little, looking relieved. “Okay, great. Yeah.” She sticks her hand out. “I’m, uh, I’m Vanya, by the way.”

It takes Five a second to realise what the hand is for. He reaches out slowly to shake it. “Ed!” He blurts, panicking and fishing for the first name he can think of.

Well.

At least he didn’t try to say his name was Aslan.

***

“I really am sorry – are you sure you aren’t in a rush?” Vanya says, setting the coffee in front of Five. He had picked out a table near the window and had taken the seat in the corner to try to trick himself into thinking he wasn’t surrounded by people. It is sort of working. He is still sat down at least, even if his knee is jostling up and down like crazy under the table.

There was no way in hell he wasn’t going to take up Vanya’s offer to sit and have coffee. The world outside could be on fire and he wouldn’t care, desperately clinging to his sister’s presence.

“No, no rush.” He swallows, mouth dry. “Thank you.” He says, unclenching his fists under the table and wrapping his hands around the coffee mug instead. They lapse into silence, each staring at their coffee and trying to sneak glances at the other.

It’s awkward.

Very awkward.

Five clears his throat and nods at the violin case sat on the third chair. “You play?”

“What?” She startles, then glances at her violin case and back. “Oh, yeah. Um, the violin. Er, do you-?”

“No.” Five shakes his head. “But ah, my sister used to play the violin, when we were kids.”

“Oh.”

The silence of their conversation creeps back in, echoing loudly in Five’s ears despite the chatter and clatter from the rest of the shop. He tries to discreetly wipe his sweaty palm down his trouser leg.

“I’m sorry.” There is a clatter as Vanya puts her mug down on the table sharply. “This is awkward, you don’t really want to talk to me, this was a bad idea-” She gets up and starts to pull her scarf off the back of her chair. “I’m just gonna go-”

Five nearly upends the table getting his feet to stop her. “No, wait!” He swallows. “Please, stay.” He frantically tries to find an excuse. “You haven’t even finished your coffee.” He tries.

She winds her scarf around her neck. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not having a very good day anyway, so-”

“So tell me about it!” He bursts. The next table looks over with a frown. He winces, and tries again more quietly. “Sorry, I’m just- awkward. I, uh, I don’t speak to people very much.”

Vanya sits back down slowly. “That’s okay.” She says seriously. “Do…do you want to talk about it?”

Five chokes. “God, no.”

“Okay.” She says quietly, frowning. Shit, Five has shut down the conversation _again_. He scratches at his beard nervously.

Why is this so difficult? They used to talk for hours as kids; he would tell Vanya nearly everything. It’s not like this with Klaus…

“So… why are you having a bad day?” He asks, kicking himself a little inside. As if she is going to want to be reminded by a stranger!

“Oh!” She seems flustered, glancing at her violin again. “Well, um, so I just got the gig as a temporary violinist with the St. Pluvium’s orchestra last month.” She falters, fiddling with the end of her scarf.

“That… sounds like a good thing?” Five says tentatively.

“Well yes, um, it’s really good actually because I haven’t quite finished my degree yet, so it’s unusual to get paid work before then, but, uh, we had the second rehearsal today and-” She sighs. “I just struggled so much. I’m just a temporary seat in fourth desk, because they need more strings for a suite they are putting on next month. But my desk partner Helen is so good, and I just wonder if I’m really meant to be there, you know?” She fiddles with a sugar packet.

“I’m sure you’re great.”

“I got called out by the conductor because my bowing was off.” She says flatly. “There’s a passage where all the sections should be bowing in sync, and there was me hacking away and ruining the look.”

“I-”

“I think I’m going to resign.”

Five shakes his head. “No, you can’t do that.” He can’t imagine Vanya being bad at playing the violin. Even as children it sounded good.

“Why not? It’s probably for the best, the rehearsal schedule is really intense, I’ve still got band practice as well, and I’ve got my final degree recitals in two months – I should be concentrating on that really.”

“You’re going to let one mistake ruin this for you?” He stares intently at her, finally managing to stop his bouncing leg as he focuses. “Will you give up the next time something goes wrong as well?”

Heat floods Vanya’s cheeks, and she stands up sharply. The cups rattle on their saucers. “This really was a mistake.” She says, picking up her violin case and not even bothering to put her coat on, just draping it over her arm after patting at the pocket. “I’m sorry about your coffee Ed.”

Five blinks as she bolts towards the door, then lurches after her in shock, his own stolen coat forgotten on the chair. “No- wait!”

He stumbles out onto the sidewalk after her, in time to see her flag down a taxi. “Vanya!”

She looks up tiredly. “Please leave me alone.” She says, ducking into the taxi, which peels away from the sidewalk swiftly. As it pulls past Five can see her shaking out some of her medication into her palm and his heart pangs, because _he did that._

He made her feel so nervous she needed her medication to cope.

He has never done that before.

When they were very young, he could remember that they would sit down for each meal, and Grace would pour them each a glass of water. They would always be given their glass in number order, no matter where they sat at the breakfast table, the one meal without their father and his strict table rules.

And when she got down the table to little Number Seven, Grace would place a small white pill next to the glass, and stand at her shoulder, her bright smile fixed on her face until Number Seven had taken her medication.

As they grew older, and Seven’s anxiety got worse, she was entrusted with a pill bottle of her own to carry around. The mealtime doses remained, but then came the little ‘half-doses, a little top up to help calm your nerves when you need them dear’. Grace would dutifully refill the bottle each week, and it became glued to Seven’s pocket. The little rattle of plastic becoming so familiar as to be unnoticeable whenever any of the siblings argued, or shouted, or their father told them all off.

If there was any kind of trouble at all really.

Luther had often triggered the little pop and rattle. Diego too, although she had been more likely to argue back with him, and panic after.

It had never been Five.

Never.

He feels sick, his coffee sitting heavy in his stomach and twisting away at his insides. _Fuck_.

He turns away, rubbing a hand down his face, only to nearly walk into a man in a blue suit, with Five’s stolen coat draped over the crook of his elbow.

“Hello Number Five, I believe you forgot this.”

Five has halfway reached to take the coat, mind still occupied with thoughts of _Vanya-upset-fuck-_ before he freezes, eyes darting up to look the man in the eye, and then quickly glancing down to check for weapons.

The man holds Five’s coat out to him, just as a cold gust of wind whips down the street, blowing through his shirt and stealing all of his warmth. Five jerkily takes the coat, but only drapes it over his shoulders, unwilling to be compromised even for a few seconds by trying to feed his arms down the sleeves.

“How do you know my name?” He hisses, fingers twitching as he watches the stranger’s face. There is no point in pretending – this person clearly knows _exactly_ who Five is, even if his sister was completely oblivious.

The man’s bland smile widens.

“I represent The Commission. We have an, _opportunity,_ for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Five, I'm sorry my man, but Vanya absolutely thinks 'Ed' is a weirdo.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed this chapter - let me know what you think! Once again thank you all so much for your support for this fic, it means so much that people enjoy what is honestly a very self-indulgent story <3
> 
>  **Update info**  
>  Heads up that I'm going to move to a fortnightly update schedule for a little while. I'm struggling a little to find enough writing time at the moment, as well as all the timeline and behind-the-scenes work on this fic, so slowing the updates a little will mean a bit less stress for me, and more polished chapters for you. Wins all round!
> 
> * * *
> 
> This weeks fic rec is: [Read Between the Lines by otherhawk](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23121733)  
>  **Summary:** Diego finds Klaus and Ben holed up in an apartment building burning books. Ofcourse he only sees Klaus.
> 
> A great oneshot that gave me some headcanons about how Klaus and Ben function, all told from Diego’s POV.


	13. Chapter 13

**Still early March 2010. Five is still 22.**

_“I represent The Commission. We have an, opportunity, for you.”_

The words echo around Five’s head as he follows the man down the sidewalk towards the park. His mind races even as his gaze flits from the man to every side street and alleyway they pass. Just in case it is some elaborate set up, and they are waiting for him to just lower his guard and..

…and what?

Grab him? Hit him?

His breath hitches. It’s fine, he can just jump, he can get away, he tells himself firmly. And he has never been afraid to take a punch. He never _liked_ it, because who did like being pummelled by Number Two on a bad day, or taking a hit from Number One even at half-strength. And if he wasn’t quick enough Number Three would send him flying with one of her kicks. So, he knows how to take it.

But ten years ago, he also knew how to dish it out in return and with interest. His reflexes probably aren’t quite as sharp after nine years or so in near complete isolation.

They pause by a bench inside the park, and the man gestures for him to sit, draping himself casually at the far end. His body language reads as very casual – the diagonal sit, the lean back against the bench arm, legs crossed at the knee and his arm draped over the back of the seat. But despite his apparently laid-back manner, Five’s instincts scream _dangerous!_

He squints, taking a second to shove his arms through his coat sleeves properly. Then he lowers himself to sit warily at the opposite end, close to the edge of the seat, with his feet flat on the floor and his hands bundled into fists in his lap. His back teeth ache with how tight his jaw is clenched.

The man leans back and closes his eyes, seemingly content to sit and bask in the ray of sunshine despite the cool temperature, and completely unconcerned by the way Five is more tense than a loaded spring, and unable to stop glaring at him.

Five works his clenched jaw loose. “So, who are you?”

“My name is Bobbin.”

“Bobbin.” Five says flatly, feeling his eyebrow twitch.

“Bobbin.” The man confirms, making a sad little sound in his throat as a cloud drifts over and blocks out his sunbeam. Five is fairly certain that this man’s name is _not_ in fact ‘Bobbin’, but considering that he himself goes by a number, he decides to let it pass for the more important information.

“So, you said you have an opportunity?”

The man lazily opens one eye. “Hmm? Oh, yes.” He lifts his head and looks properly at Five. “I work for The Commission, an organisation that monitors and maintains the time-space continuum, with the occasional timeline preservation, through carefully calculated manipulations and removals.”

Five’s eyes narrow. Preservation of time?

“-long story short, we maintain the correct timeline, _all_ the time.” He says with an airy hand wave.

Five just stares.

They _maintain the timeline?_

What does that even mean?

As far as Five can tell, the timeline is self-maintaining. After all, his own displacements never seem to change anything – he had secretly suspected that it was that way for years, and that nothing he did in the past would cause any change. After all, Klaus has always been constant. Five had tried several times to change things, little experiments to see if his actions have any effect.

There was no denying it after he went back and spoke to his father. It was the highest stake trial he had ever done, providing information about the future to possibly the only person with the intelligence and resources to act on it. He hadn’t even intended to do it, just seized the opportunity as it fell into his lap. He had been desperate for it to work, so full of cautious hope despite himself that he had nearly burst with it.

And nothing had changed.

He had _explicitly told his father the date that the world ended,_ and it had not mattered. Not a single thing had changed, and Five had returned to the far too familiar and empty world that made up his own personal hell. Either his father hadn’t cared (doubtful, after threatening them with the end of the world if they failed their training goals as children), or his father had failed (more plausible, although distressing). Whether through a lack of detailed information to make suitable plans, or a lack of confidence in Five’s description of the total devastation, his father had not adequately acted to prevent the apocalypse.

Or, as Five has recently come to theorise, time is like a lake.

Five might drop into the past, and create ripples from his displacements, like a stone thrown into the water. And those little changes, those ripples of water from the stone breaking the surface may then radiate outward like waves, seemingly changing things as they go. The bigger the displacement, or dropped stone, the larger the ripples. But, eventually, each ripple loses momentum, getting smaller and smaller until the changes are all but negligible. And then, before you know it the water’s surface is smooth once more, and indistinguishable from before the stone was dropped. Underneath the surface, nothing has changed, apart from the settling of the small stone, very precisely in one place, affecting nothing else in the lake.

And in reality, nothing about that lake as a whole has really changed.

Nothing Five does on his displacements can affect more than the immediate time around when he actually drops. He can kick up a bit of sand, but ultimately it will resettle, and the lake is still a lake - still the same shape, the same size, the same depth, with the same fish swimming around.

“Maintain the timeline.” Five repeats flatly.

“Yep.” Bobbin says, popping the ‘p’.

“Maintain… as in keep things happening?”

Bobbin raises an eyebrow. “Not as such. More… keeping things in line. Nudging things back on track to ensure a smooth flow and the correct outcome.”

Five’s eyes narrow. “And you, what? Time travel? To nudge things along?”

“Some of us.” Bobbin nods. “But we are just a fraction of a bigger organisation – behind each correction there is a case manager, who may be working as part of a larger Significant Events team, and then there’s all the people in the department that who go over the numbers and run different models…” He shakes his head, then smiles widely. “But you don’t want to hear about all that! You want to hear about our offer.”

Um, no, Five’s pretty sure he does want to hear all about that, because it sounds a lot more sophisticated than he’d have thought possible – if he had ever entertained the thought of something like this existing in the first place.

“So, we want you to join our team. Specifically, we want you to work in the MAPS team, where you-”

“Maps.” Five interjects. He doesn’t understand. Part of their training was being able to read maps, and he has kept up the skill as he travels through hell, but he has absolutely no idea why it would be relevant to a time travelling organisation, or why they would need _him_ in particular. “You’ve tracked me down, all because you want me to come and work on some maps for you?”

“No, no, no. Not _maps_.” He sits up with a chuckle. “MaPS – the Mathematics, Probabilities and Statistics division. They are the engine of The Commission, they run all the background calculations to see if an event is about to veer off course, how badly, and the scale of intervention required. They also model different options sometimes, so the most expedient solution can be chosen.”

Five frowns. “And you want me to do that?”

“Yes.” Bobbin leans forward towards him, as if he is about to impart some great secret. “Your understanding of time and mathematics is, I’m told, ‘frankly astounding’. When an opening came up, apparently several people in the math team rushed to suggest you.” He shrugs. “So, they sent me out here to try and recruit you.”

“And what would you know about my math skills?”

Bobbin raises an eyebrow and gives him a disbelieving look. “Who do you think clears up after your little library trips, hmm?”

Well.

Five hadn’t thought about what happened to his notes before.

“You just go along, break into the college library, work through theories surrounding time and space. And then you disappear again, leaving your notes out for any curious student to find. There are at least two grad students, and a particularly beleaguered post-doc, who could have made it big with Nature papers if we hadn’t swept your notes away. The post-doc would even have gotten a Nobel prize!” He laughs. “No, no. Some of our field agents are dispatched, collect your notes after you vanish, and return them to HQ for processing. They should have been filed straight away, but you have some admirers who wanted to drool over your anti-suspension-time-capitulation-whatsit theory, so hey, you have a job offer.”

Actually, it is an anti-suspension time _catalyst_ , but Five certainly isn’t going to enlighten him.

“No.”

Bobbin seems surprised. “No?”

“No.” Five says mildly. “I don’t want to come and work for this… Commission.”

“Why not?” Bobbin says, leaning forward and frowning at Five. Five frowns back, standing up and straightening out his coat.

“Because I don’t like math, and I don’t agree your principles. Time is self-maintaining; it doesn’t need massaging along to keep going. It is a force - Time existed just fine before humans, and it’ll continue to exist long after we are all gone.” He shoves his cold hands into his pockets agitatedly, still wary of the situation but no longer believing he is about to be jumped any second. “And _manipulations and removals?_ Who decides that a person is worth saving, or needs manipulating, or worse yet, _removing?_ Killing should be a last resort, done only in defence of yourself or others. Anything else… that’s just murder.”

He carefully swallows down the memory of Ben’s ‘clean up’ of the robbers in their first mission. They had held guns to people’s heads and had shot at his siblings. They were _not_ innocent. If they hadn’t been contained and dealt with, then somebody would have died. That day, or the next, or years down the line, somebody would have died, Five is sure. What they did, they did for the right reasons. Not because some organisation had coldly calculated that they needed to be removed. It was different.

It was different.

“Are you sure about that, Number Five?” Bobbin asks from the bench, leaning back calmly with a mild expression. “You haven’t actually heard about what we do.”

“I’m not interested.” Five spits, skin beginning to itch. “Now leave me alone!” He spins on his heel and blinks across the park, back to the street. He begins to stomp up the sidewalk towards the library, feeling the tingling start to spread all over. With a frustrated grunt, he ducks into an alleyway and behind a dumpster before he vanishes.

He drops back into hell, stumbling slightly as his toes catch in the puddle of clothes on the floor. With a curse, he catches himself with a hand on the wagon before he trips over the wooden arms, kicking his feet free of the sweater. He leans down and picks the clothes up, lifting them in the air one by one and attempting to shake out the loose dirt with a sigh. The old beaten jeans feel heavy and the blue woollen sweater itches when he pulls it over his head, ignoring the large cartoon mickey mouse on the front.

He had never understood his sibling’s fascination with watching the cartoons as young children, and he still doesn’t now.

He turns back to the wagon, and crouches down so he is level with Dolores, who is carefully strapped in at the front where it tips down towards the ground without him holding it up. He frowns as he gets a good look at her, and with a tut he pulls his sleeve over his hand and begins to gently wipe the dirt from her face.

“Now Dolores, that’s no way for a lady to look, hmm?” He says, running his hands down the lapels of her coat and gently tugging it straight, smoothing the fabric across her shoulders. “I know it’s my fault, I’m sorry. I didn’t get any warning this time.” He frowns as he looks past her, taking in the state of the wagon for the first time.

The cover has come loose, now tied only on one side, the other half of his old trusted red and yellow circus canvas flapping lazily in the wind, the sturdy climbing rope he uses to tie it down trailing into the dirt. The kettle and pan he usually hangs from the back are sat in the dirt a few feet away, and by his feet lays some of his canned food and coffee that has rolled out. Everything is covered in a light coat of brown dirt, even the tight roll of his bedding peeking out from beneath the cover.

How long has he been gone?

Hesitantly he reaches out to touch the bedding, letting out a sigh of relief when it is dry. However long he has been gone, at least it hasn’t rained on his belongings. It must have been some very strong winds to have loosened the knot work securing the canvas, but it explains why the floaty blue scarf he remembers draping around Dolores’ neck is nowhere to be seen.

“What a fucking mess.” He mutters, starting to pick up the nearest cans and stack them neatly. Wincing, he realises the lid must have come off his box containing his books, as he finds some stray pens and a dusty notebook on the ground. He thanks his lucky stars that it didn’t rain and ruin his years of hard work.

“Sorry Dolores, I didn’t mean to be gone so long.” He stands and starts to work his way around the wagon collecting his fallen belongings, wincing at the feel of dirt inside his socks and rubbing between his toes. He might just have to spare a jump back a mile or so to where they had left the river behind to short cut to the next big town, because now he has got used to periodically washing again it’s very difficult to ignore the feeling of dirt festering, when he knows it’ll eventually blister if he leaves it.

Picking up the last of the cans that has rolled away, he comes back to the wagon, loosely tying down the flapping canvas and taking a moment to look at the sky. He checks the position of the sun and his shadow, coming to the conclusion that it is probably around mid-morning – plenty of time to take a break before trudging on. The sky is blue and clear, barely a whisper of clouds to be seen, and a gentle breeze ripples through the spare patches of grass.

It is about as nice a day as it ever gets in hell.

“Dolores.” He whispers, sitting down in front of her and idly moving a can of coffee from one hand to the other. His face breaks into a wide smile. “Dolores, I got to see _Vanya._ ” He can feel Dolores’ shock, and he looks up at her, still grinning widely.

“I was so stupid, I told her my name was ‘Ed’ of all things – no, don’t laugh! – and she bought me a coffee. She’s nearly finished a degree – our little Vanya, a degree!” God, he is so proud, he is practically giddy with it. Even when they were twelve, just shy of thirteen, they had just barely known what colleges and degrees were. Ben and Five had both wanted to go when they were older. _Desperately_. Ben had said he just wanted to escape the confines of the house, make some friends, and meet people who weren’t his siblings. Five had simply wanted to get out and stand on his own two feet, make something of himself where he didn’t need his father for _anything_.

Well, he supposes he got his wish. Sort of.

“And she’s in an orchestra, playing the violin for some concert or something and being paid for it, even if she’s still a student. She said that’s unusual – normally students don’t get paid work or something? – but I knew it.” He says smugly, waving his arms grandly in the air. “I always knew she was going to be extraordinary with her violin. She’s going to lead an orchestra one day. I just know it!”

His smile fades as he remembers what happened next, how she had closed off from him, and all but _ran away_.

How she had needed to take an emergency dose of her anxiety medicine.

Because of him.

“I- I upset her.” He confesses hoarsely. “I didn’t mean to!” He rushes to assure Dolores, a sick feeling in his gut. “But- but I- I don’t know what I said wrong! She was talking about giving up the orchestra, all because of one bad rehearsal, and I was just telling her she shouldn’t, you can’t just give up, and she’s better than that!”

He sighs, shoulders slumping as he looks down and messes with his bootlace.

“I didn’t mean too.” He mutters. “Whatever I said that upset her, I didn’t mean it.”

He lets out a carefully controlled breath, blinking furiously.

“I didn’t.”

***

Five doesn’t tell Dolores about Bobbin, and the strange ‘Commission’ organisation he had said he worked for. He’s not sure why, other than that any time he thinks about that meeting, all the hairs on his neck stand up, his body shivers and his gut feels like it has turned to stone.

If Five has learnt one thing in his years in hell, it is that his gut often knows better than he does.

He knows that she knows that he isn’t telling her something. He is jumpy for weeks after it happens, spinning around at the slightest sound, checking for any mysterious time travellers haunting his steps. He is less talkative on the road, he scavenges like he is on a mission, is tense when he sets up camp, and at day’s end he is slow to fall asleep. There are nights where he sits with his back to the fire and faces out into the dark, a knife resting in his lap, keeping watch.

They have never had a care for what might be ‘out there’. Never bothered with a watch. Because there was nothing out there to be afraid of.

There has never been anything or anyone else around.

It takes nearly two weeks before he can settle enough to dig out his notebooks and focus his mind on his calculations. And even then, his head feels heavy with a lack of sleep. It’s another day or so after that before he looks up from a particularly long and tedious calculation, and realises that some of his notes are missing. Some of the loose sheets of rough workings and ideas to work through, sheets that he usually kept safely slotted inside the notebook covers, are gone. It is not until he frantically turns over the whole box, his breath short and palms sweating, that he realises he is also missing the notebook where he theorises about time itself, and how it works, rather than figuring out how to travel through it.

They have covered too much ground for him to go back and look for them. In fact, his memory of the past few weeks is foggy at best, so he can’t even remember where he was when he had displaced, and the winds wreaked havoc on his wagon.

He barely stops himself from kicking the wheel of the wagon in frustration, instead stomping a few metres away and _screaming_ his anguish into the wind, ignoring Dolores’ concern.

It’s yet another setback.

And just when he was _so close_ to a breakthrough, it had felt as if all he had to do was reach out and grasp it.

Fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So y’know when you are just noodling along with your story and somebody says something that sticks in your brain and you have to use the idea? Yeah you can thank [Aye of Newt’s tumblr post](https://aye-of-newt.tumblr.com/post/639507572615970816/ive-seen-a-lot-of-people-talk-about-how-fucked-up) for the early introduction to the commission!
> 
> Also, Bobbin was not being called anything else. I tried bob, a nice, bland, ten-to-a-dozen name but nope. He said his name was bobbin and bobbin it was. I gave in – Bobbin probably won’t raise eyebrows next to Cha-cha.
> 
> I’m glad you all liked getting to see Vanya last chapter, even if it was horrifically awkward for everybody involved. I hope you liked this chapter too. Once again thank you all so much for your support for this story – it really does mean so much!
> 
> So, I have a question – I’m gearing up to rewrite the summary (again), and it would be really helpful to know what drew you to the fic in the first place (so I don’t accidentally take out the good stuff), and what it is about the fic that meant you stayed (the apocalypse angst? Klaus and Five? Dolores? Something else?). Alternatively if you feel like trying to sum up the fic in a sentence or two, feel free to throw some suggestions my way!
> 
> * * *
> 
> This week’s rec is: [ It's What We Do in the Death by 1PB2PB3PB4](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24394924)
> 
>  **Summary:** Ben dies at age 16 on the polished, but blood covered floor of a bank, ripped apart by the Horror. The next day- or the same day? The same thing happens once more. And again. He always dies at age 16, it's what happens while he's dead that seems to change. Groundhog day time loop, but not quite.
> 
> I figured I owe you guys a longer rec after some shorter ones, so here is 60k of WIP to sink your teeth into. How this has less kudos than TTL right now is a mystery (go give it some love guys!). Ben is no saint (and neither is Klaus) - he’s flawed and he’s desperate, but he tries and keeps trying over and over.


	14. Chapter 14

**April 2 nd, 2019. Five is 24 (and 13, and 39ish).**

Five awakes with a start as he begins to cough harshly. Confused, it takes him a moment to work out where he is. Why is he naked, why is the air full of smoke, why is he curled up on rubble-strewn ground with a crumbling brick under his side? But, as he rubs at his stinging eyes and blinks, blearily trying to bring the world into focus, he realises that the world really is tinted a sickly orange colour, and that rubbing at his eyes only aggravates them further.

And there’s only one time in the world that he remembers being like this.

With a curse, he pushes himself to his feet, wincing at the sharp bite of the debris even through the thick callouses of his soles. Klaus always says his feet are disgusting, and threatens to take a cheese grater to them, but Five guards his thick skin fiercely – literally his only protection when he is stranded in time, and as naked as the day he was born.

He stumbles out of the way of the plume of smoke he has been laying in, coughing fiercely and nearly gagging at the foul taste it leaves on his tongue, a mix of burning fuel and charred flesh. Looking up, he sees it comes from a burning truck, tipped on his side. The majority of the fire has probably passed, with no hungry flames rising from the service window, just a blackened, smoking, and smouldering shell of what it used to be (and he knows, from past experience, that if he looks inside, he’ll see the charred and unidentifiable remains of whatever poor soul had been working in the van when it set alight).

Well, at least he knows where he is now.

That truck is as familiar to him as the gates of the academy once were, many years ago. It has been his landmark for the Glade for years, just south of where he would find his way between rubble piles to visit his sibling’s cairns. With a sigh, he begins the sorry search for some clothes, carefully picking his way down what used to be a street, casting his eyes over every mound of rubble. He spots an old car, half crushed by the fallen wall of a building, and steps cautiously up to it, careful of the shattered glass underfoot.

The body of a man sits in the driver’s seat, his chest collapsed forwards to drape over the steering wheel, arms hung loosely by his sides. His head is turned just enough that Five can see his empty stare, with dark bruising all around his eyes. Old, dried blood trickles from his nose and ear, yet Five can see no obvious cause of death when he glances further into the car. The wall collapsed on the back half of the vehicle, crumpling the roof and falling through the windows to fill the back seat. Whoever was sat there had no chance, the only sign they even existed is just the sight of their boots, and a dust-covered hand sticking out from the devastation. But the driver has no sign of injury – he wasn’t crushed, and there is no wound on his head to indicate a fatal blow.

Five shakes his head, pushing aside his many questions on just what had ended the world. Clothes. He needs clothes, and this man has them. He pushes his arm through the broken window and grasps the shoulder of the man’s jacket, and with a heave, he pulls him through a jump and onto the street, the corpse collapsing into a heap as Five’s grip on his shoulder slips. He pants, and can feel his hands tremble from the exertion of pulling something so large through the jump with him.

Trying to ignore the corpse’s accusing stare, he walks down the body and holds his feet up to compare against the work boots. They are larger than his own feet, so he crouches down and begins to unlace them, tugging the boots off and stripping the body of its socks. He bundles them down the boots to fill the gap between his toes and the end of the steel-capped boot. _The man must have been a construction worker of some kind,_ Five thinks distractedly as he swiftly strips the body of its clothes and puts them on with a shiver.

He had quickly gotten used to stealing clothes from corpses when he first landed, but it had never stopped feeling wrong.

After pausing to have another attempt at hacking up his lungs, he sets off towards the Glade, picking his way around pockets of fire and over mounds of rubble. Another half-crushed car yields a large trench coat left in the empty passenger seat, so he drapes that over his arm and continues. As he crosses the smooth circle of exposed concrete he swallows, knowing what will soon be there. What he is about to help build. With a steadying breath, he pulls on his power and jumps, landing next to the little red trailer filled with random items (why he had collected a broken umbrella is beyond him, but he’s long since realised that panic does strange things to the mind).

“Hey Dolores.” He says, nodding amicably and keeping his distance, rather than standing next to her and grasping her hand for comfort the way he desperately wants too. Her gaze is sharp and wary, and he can feel her distrust. He still remembers how it had taken many weeks of living together, and several demonstrations of his displacements before she would stop bristling around his older selves. “They over there?”

He looks across to where he remembers making that gut-wrenching discovery. That catalyst moment, where he went from being a little boy crying about being lost, to understanding that he was truly all alone and that there wasn’t anybody left to find.

“Thanks Dolores.” He says absently, brushing the fingers of his spare hand over her shoulder as he picks his way past the trailer and towards the place that has haunted his nightmares. He rounds the pile of rubble that blocks his view and suddenly, there they are.

His younger, round-faced 13-year-old self is just pulling back from where he had been curled into the naked and lightly scarred chest of their older self, tears still trickling down his dirty cheeks. Five doesn’t even wince as he watches his younger self wipe his running nose down his sleeve. He can still remember that, as distraught as he was, it had still hurt him inside to do that to his uniform - not yet accustomed to the idea that practically any form of hygiene had gone out of the window. That he would no longer be able to wash twice a day, every day, the way he had liked (or wash any of his clothes at all, for the next few years).

“Here,” Five says, stepping over and holding out the long coat to the oldest Five, who reaches out with an expression of relief. “Got you something to wear.” The coat, which reaches halfway down Five’s calves, was obviously made for a man taller than Five, who, even as an adult, is barely a scarce three inches or so taller than the day he first arrived in hell. But, with the waist belt securely fastened, all of the Five’s finally have their modesty again, and the black colour is painfully appropriate for the task they are about to perform.

“You okay?” He asks his younger self, painfully aware that he is _not_ okay, but unsure what else to really say or do. Because none of them are _okay_. The youngest Five lets out a gasping sob and shakes, grasping his own elbows and looking haunted. Even the eldest Five is flinching every time he catches sight of Klaus’ body at the side, little involuntary twitches of his beard and clenching of his hands seemingly going unnoticed by their distraught and shell-shocked younger counterpart, but obvious to Five who is grimly trying to detach himself from the situation.

He crouches next to where their youngest self is knelt in the dirt, and awkwardly pats his shoulder, reaching with the other hand to pick up the bloodied glass eye from the dirt. With a sigh he uses the corner of his stolen shirt, and a bit of spit, to start cleaning away the sticky congealed blood. The eye is as familiar to him as the back of his own hand by this point, the serial number burnt into his memory from the many nights he had sat contemplating it, and how it connected back to whatever has caused the apocalypse.

Because it had to mean something. Luther didn’t just go around ripping out people’s eyes when they were on missions as children – he had much more effective methods of incapacitating his opponents. And, whilst they’d all been taught to gouge at the eyes (‘ _An obvious weak spot children, one you would do well to guard on yourselves, and exploit on your enemies!’_ ), it had been a shock and pain tactic, rather than a genuine attempt at permanently removing their opponent’s vision.

Wordlessly, he places the cleaned eye into their youngest self’s palm, gently wrapping his fingers up to close around it. Young Five has succumbed to his despair, his eyes glassy and staring, as he sits in the dirt next to Klaus’ body. His sobbing is reduced to whimpers, his breathing unsteady, and he gives no reaction as Five gently squeezes his shoulder, before standing and gesturing the eldest Five to follow as he walks a short distance away.

He looks his older self up and down, taking in the tanned face, the long hair and scraggy beard, both beginning to show the odd grey hair. Deep creases frame his eyes from the long years of squinting in to all the wind and weather hell can throw at them.

This isn’t a Five that has gotten out of hell.

“Still stuck?” He asks quietly, even though he has little hope. His older self levels him with a tired look. “Right,” he mutters, shoving his hands into the pocket of the too large hoody he stole. He blows a frustrated raspberry, trying not to think about what he needs to do next even as his mind keeps circling back around to it.

Christ, he had hoped, _prayed_ even, that this day wouldn’t come.

Not again.

He had honest-to-god knelt down on top of his nest of blankets, clasped his hands in his lap and pleaded out loud for fate to hear. Prayed to any god he could remember (even though he didn’t believe in any of them), in the desperate hope they would hear his plea anyway. To grant his wish that this day, this awful, horrible day would only live on his memory and not in fact. That he would have cracked the calculations by now, and have made the jump back to his family, preventing it all from happening in the first place.

To get to this displacement (if the displacements were even fixed points in his personal timeline and not just…random – he’s not sure about that yet and has no way to test it), at a time when he was back in society. A time when he could wash every day and eat well at every meal. That he would simply end up leaving his 40-year-old siblings on just another day in the glorious extension of their lives, and to land back at a day that, to them, would simply be one insignificant day like any other in the year 2019. To chide a younger Five for being silly and prideful, and running away from his family. And then, once he was suitably chastised, coaching him through the calculations he would need to go back to his family and finish the hot dinner he had foolishly left at the table.

“We should uncover Lu-” he glances back towards where young Five should be, now out of sight beyond the piles of rubble. Young Five who just ran away from a family where they all were numbered, and nobody was named. He swallows. “One first. He’s going to be the heaviest, so we should move him before we get tired-”

“We should just burn them.” Older Five says curtly, eyes darting from where they can see Allison and Diego’s bodies back to the rubble pile that hides the youngest Five from view.

Five’s head whips back in shock, and he stares at his older self. “What?!”

“We should burn them,” His older self repeats, turning to stare at him. “Not make them graves, or cairns, or whatever you want to call them that makes us feel better. Not leave him something to be tied to, that he’ll starve himself to stay with, rather than leave when the pickings get thin.” His older self glances toward the youngest Five’s direction, lowering his tone back to a low hiss. “He needs to be focused on getting out of this hell-hole! Not wasting his scavenging time with lining his pockets with pretty rocks, or useless trinkets, and bringing them back to their graves because just he thinks they’d like them, and _he can’t let go!_ ”

And Five just stares in shock at this panting, wild eyed and angry man, and, for second, he longer recognises himself in this stranger.

“Shit,” he breathes, and then swallows harshly against the lump rising in his throat. He clears his throat, twice, glancing back to check their younger self hasn’t started to come looking for them yet. “You can’t mean that. Those are _\- that’s_ _our siblings you are talking about!_ We _have_ to lay them to rest. After all this, you can’t just burn our brothers and sister in front of him! _”_

 _In front of me,_ he adds silently, feeling raw and exposed, his heart hurting fiercely at even just the thought of it and his stomach threatening to revolt.

“It’d be better for him,” his older self replies stubbornly.

“Like fucking hell it would,” Five spits back. “You can’t really believe that having only a memory of two of his older selves dragging his siblings’ bodies into a pile, and us all hunting around to find some fuel before _setting them on fire_ is really going to be less traumatic than what we went through?”

His older self winces, and shuffles his weight from foot to foot. “No,” he mutters, glaring at the ground, “But at least he could move on sooner. Starve less maybe.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Five says quietly. “C’mon, we both know that’s not how time works. We could pile them up now, and then hunt around, and we’ll never find the fuel to make a pyre. We’ve already buried them - and they deserve better than being thrown on, -on one of those to smoulder with the rest of the world!” He says, waving at the pockets of fire that still burn around them, the smell of burning flesh hanging dully in the air. He opens his mouth to carry on, and then he notices.

It’s small, but he spots the tremble of his older self’s tightly clenched fists, the tightness of his lips in his too-pale face. The wet sheen of his eyes as he blinks rapidly. Five deflates slightly, unsure what to make of it. “You… okay?”

His older self sucks in shaky breath, shaking his head. “No,” he gasps quietly, “I can’t do it again. I can’t bury them for a third time!”

Five swallows, a sting in his own eyes as he feels his own emotions surge. He steps forward and places a hand on his older self’s shaking arm. “I know,” he says, his voice sounding as hollow as he feels. “I know.”

Five doesn’t know who moves first, but suddenly they are grasping desperately at each other, burying their faces into each other’s shoulders to muffle the gasping sobs as they realise that, yes, they really do have to do this again.

They really have revisited the worst day of their life.

They really do have to lift, and carry, and place, and _bury_ their siblings.

Again.

For Five, it’s the knowledge that he doesn’t just have to get through today. If he doesn’t succeed in his calculations, he will have to do this a third time _._ Revisit this godawful day for a third time, when once was one time too many.

Pull on that brave face he remembers his elder selves having when he first lived it. The one that he had seen, and believed in - that these older, wiser selves could hold their emotions. That time could maybe, just maybe, soothe the raw and gaping hole inside him. He has spent the last 11 years wondering, just when would he feel less like a walking wound?

And now he knows.

It never hurts any less.

It _never_ _will_ hurt any less, not even if he lives for a hundred years.

(He prays he doesn’t live for a hundred years. Certainly not in hell.)

He sniffs into his older self’s shoulder, fingers aching from how tight he twists them into the back of the black coat. His elder self is muttering, over and over, “I failed them. I couldn’t change it, it’s my fault.”

“We can do this,” Five whispers wetly, trying to convince himself, “we _have_ to do this. And then I will change it. _We_ will change it.” He feels his older self nod slightly, hears the hiss as he pulls a breath through his teeth and tries to get himself back under control.

A moment later, they gingerly let go of one another, studiously looking away from the other as they wipe away runny noses and teary cheeks using their sleeves.

“Okay,” Five says, carefully controlling his voice and ignoring how sore and dry his eyes feel. “We have to do this.”

His older self nods. “Number order then,” he croaks.

“Number order,” Five agrees numbly, then starts to pick his way across to where Luth- _Number One_ is half buried. He blinks furiously as he gets there, looking down at the almost peaceful face of his brother – like he had just paused to rest his eyes for a moment after a hard mission, the deathly pallor of his skin disguised by the thick layers of dust and dirt.

After a moment of both staring at their brother’s corpse in silence, his older self quietly asks, “Do you have enough energy to jump him out?”

Five shakes his head. “No, I pulled a corpse out of car to get their clothes earlier. I could shift some smaller things, maybe,” he says, eyeing up the width of Lu- _One’s_ shoulders and trying to take stock of his energy levels, “But not a whole body.”

“Right, okay then,” his older self mutters, before rolling his shoulders back and stepping forward to grasp the gloved hand that had held the glass eye. Then, with a careful exhale, he pulls, and they disappear in a flash of blue, reappearing several feet away with a crashing thump, as the true bulk (and weight) of their brother is revealed.

“Jesus,” Five whispers in shock, “I thought I just remembered him as being huge because I was young and small.” His older self just nods in agreement, as their aforementioned young self stumbles around the corner, the eye still clasped loosely in his hand. He makes a wounded sound, like a cross between a whine and a sob as he stumbles to One’s side and sinks to his already scraped knees. His little hands tremble as he hovers them over his brother’s broad chest, before reaching for his limbs in an attempt to lay them respectfully.

“Won’t work,” Five says gently, stepping forward to gently guide Five’s hands back to his own chest. “Rigor mortis has set in,” he says. At younger Five’s despairing look, complete with watering, red-rimmed eyes, he tries to amend it. “His muscles will soften again by tomorrow. We can move him today, and you can make sure he’s comfortable tomorrow before you finish burying him.”

When younger Five makes a choking noise at that, he looks to older Five in panic. “We’ll help you move them all. There’s a patch of clear ground not far away where we can put them all to rest,” their older self says, his soothing tone interrupted by the hoarseness of his voice. Younger Five nods miserably.

“Okay then,” Five says quietly, “let’s get started.”

***

And so, they spend the next few hours painstakingly moving their siblings. Gently uncovering them from the rubble, and then carrying them across the precarious ground to the Glade, one by one. The two eldest Five’s take turns holding onto their sibling’s shoulders or legs, whilst the youngest Five switches between guiding them over tricky footing and trying to help carry their siblings by lifting their bodies at the hips.

Once each of their siblings is laid out around the curve of the Glade, in number order like a clock-face, Five sends his younger and older selves to go collect rubble and bricks to begin building their cairns. He meets the grateful look his elder self sends him with a stoic nod, and then begins the task of searching through all their sibling’s pockets for anything useful.

He methodically removes Diego’s knife harness and sets it aside with the single small knife still left in it. Tries not to think about why he is missing the rest. From Luther he awkwardly rolls the gloves from his hands and sets them on top of the harness to later protect young Five’s palms. He takes nothing from Allison, whose clothes are impractical, and pockets are empty. Instead, he simply smooths her long hair down to frame her face and shoulders. In the depths of Klaus’ coat pockets, he finds a few squares of chocolate, hastily wrapped in tinfoil and only slightly misshapen, which he adds to the pile. A small, hollow and entirely inadequate consolation prize for the loss of their family.

And then he begins the job of building their cairns around them, using the bricks and materials his other selves bring back to slowly start covering the bodies, hastily wiping away the few miserable tears that slip past his guard before his younger self can see.

Then, a few hours later his younger self returns from a trip alone, arms clutching at bricks and eyes shiny, and whispers that their eldest self had left. Five squeezes his shoulder and starts to teach him how to layer the rubble so it sits securely and won’t slip away.

And an hour later, he feels the tell-tale tightening of his own gut. He turns, and grasps his younger self, drawing him into a hug.

“You can do this. You can change it - do better than us,” he whispers fiercely into his ear.

And then he too vanishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, apologies for the delay in posting this chapter. My horse has been very poorly for the past two weeks, and is not out of the woods yet, so whilst I've been hiding from my worry by reading a lot of fics in my spare time, I've not had the headspace to do a lot of writing of my own. I'm going to anticipate the next chapter won't be ready within two weeks either, and is more likely to be three week again, as he is needing more care than normal. Hopefully after that we can get back on track with fortnightly updates. Thank you for your patience! <3
> 
> Secondly, thanks for all your continued support and love for this story. I thoroughly enjoy reading and replying to all your comments, and I really appreciate the feedback to help with redrafting the summary!
> 
> Also - TTL HAS FANART <333 Kimbasprite made this amazing moodboard for TTL - check it out [HERE](https://pokemonmasterkimba.tumblr.com/post/642410050456043520/fanfiction-moodboards-1-the-time-travellers)
> 
> If you want to say hi on tumblr (or just keep an eye out for updates regarding delays to new chapters) I'm @LittleRit :)
> 
> * * *
> 
> Fic recs - have two this week to make up for the delay in posting the chapter! 
> 
> [Memento Mori by MercuryMuse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29201058)  
> Against all odds the Hargreeves manage to successfully travel back to 2019, and together they slowly settle back into everyday life. Unfortunately for Five, things take an unexpected turn when he is diagnosed with early-onset dementia.
> 
> verdict: ALL THE FEELS!
> 
> [The Longest Night by nicedress](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29058651)  
> He’s trapped—in some sort of box, he’s trapped—and he lets out a sound somewhere between a sob and a delirious laugh, banging on the low ceiling.
> 
> He can’t remember how he got here. He can’t remember anything. His mind scrambles backward, retracing his steps, trying to follow the thread that ended here: with Dad locking him in a box as another fucked up experiment, a new way to force him to face the dead.
> 
> Or: LittleRit is a complete sucker for a buried alive fic and this does not disappoint.


	15. Chapter 15

**Late evening, The Academy, December 2005. Klaus is 16.**

Klaus stomps his way up the stairwell and down the corridor towards his room, his hands clenching and unclenching, and his back teeth aching from how tightly he clamps his jaw. His head is pounding - not helped by the ghost lady wailing outside Vanya’s bedroom.

“Shut up!” he hisses, one hand raising to rub at his temple, the other turning the handle of his bedroom door.

He is _not_ having a good day. Not at all. It might be evening now, but his ears still ring from the dressing down Reginald gave him in the hallway that morning; berating him in front of his siblings for everything from the spot on his shoes to his apparent ‘mule-like attitude and frankly unacceptable apathy towards further developing his potential’.

Well, whatever. He had tried okay?

So maybe he hadn’t tried his absolute best - not in training, in front of their Dad. He hadn’t wanted to fail and be pushed further. He _definitely_ hadn’t wanted to succeed and prove him right either. Except, he sort of does want this to be a possibility of his powers – deep down he does actually want to succeed at this seemingly impossible task that has been set for him.

Just not for their Dad, and certainly not on his terms.

So, he had stood there and taken the scolding for his sloppy appearance, and the dressing down for his attitude. Had stared at the taxidermy on the wall behind his father, and tried not to think about how the second he was free he was going to smoke the neatly rolled joint in his trouser pocket, lest his father somehow read his intentions on his face.

It hadn’t worked. Sometimes, he really does wonder if their father has a power of his own.

His siblings had been lined up with him in the hallway of course, for the morning inspection. One, Two, Three, Four, no Five (quelle surprise!), Six and Seven, all in a row, nicely spaced along the black and white tiles like checkers on a chessboard. Uniforms neatly pressed, hair combed, and shoes shiny. Then little old him in the middle, who hadn’t quite buffed his shoes to standard, or tamed the loose curls just starting to form in his hair (Mom had smoothed them down afterwards and promised to cut his hair during the weekend free time).

Just lazy Number Four who didn’t pull his weight on missions, who couldn’t get over his fears and couldn’t manage the task set for him by their father, even if he was forced to train into the night. Never mind that his powers weren’t useful for combat, or that he’d been so exhausted that he’d barely toed off his shoes and shrugged out of his blazer before falling onto his bed and into the land of sleep.

No, Klaus just isn’t up to standard.

But fuck it, he had been trying! After bedtime, on nights where their father didn’t stick wires to their head, he’d sat back up in bed, wrapping his blanket around his shoulders as he sat cross-legged in the middle of the mattress and tried to meditate. Breathed deeply into the darkness, trying to settle his mind - trying to access the summoning power his father seemed to believe he possessed.

Tried to summon his wayward time travelling brother, through whatever nebulous, mystical connection they had that meant his brother kept reappearing by his side whenever he fell sideways through time.

But no dice. He had stayed up late, when he could, and tried for weeks to do the impossible. To try to reach across time, and draw his brother to his side in the way that he could claw back the curtain to the afterlife, and bring forth the ghosts of people passed. Had tried and failed to summon up a scrap of power, or even just a wisp of blue light at his fists.

And this afternoon it had come to a head, when his father, still angry from morning inspection, had pushed and pushed in personal training, questioning Klaus’ actions and commitment until he had finally lost what little patience he had. Unleashing a lecture on how thoroughly disappointed he was in Klaus’ lack of results, and how it was deplorable that he hadn’t managed to bring forth a Five from the future by this point.

Personally, Klaus thinks it is all a bit cuckoo. His power lies with the dead. In perceiving those departed and wishing they would shut the fuck up. How his father came up with the idea that he could somehow be able to summon Five, he doesn’t know. Five isn’t _dead._ Five doesn’t even exist in this time period (that Klaus is aware of – he’s fairly certain Five told him he was ahead, _way_ ahead in the future).

So, with a final glare over his shoulder at the wailing woman, Klaus and his little headache of doom enter his bedroom.

The dim, warm glow of his string lights greets him, and he sighs with relief as he shuts the door against the noise and light of the hallway, leaning back against the wood and closing his eyes. Christ but his head _hurts_. He doesn’t even bend down to undo his shoelaces, instead he just sinks his weight into the door and tries to toe them off where he stands. He kicks them to the side and works on sliding off his socks, happily wiggling his bare toes against the floor. Reluctantly, he opens his eyes so he can step across to his bed, pausing at his desk to undo his tie and shirt collar, dumping his tie in a pile on top of the math work he needs to finish at some point.

His room is soothing, a deliberately decorated and maintained sanctuary of soft colours, warm lights and cozy furnishings. Everything that his powers and his training are not. The only exception is the artwork on the yellow walls, the vivid words, the bright paintings, and the scribbled drawings that Klaus puts there in fits of inspiration or desperation. Sometimes he wakes up in the mornings and read a line, and he wonders who wrote it - him or the ghosts?

He tosses his blazer into the corner, and flops onto the bed. He is just closing his eyes when a sudden weight begins to crush him, knocking the wind straight from his lungs. His eyes snap open but all he can see is wild grey hair, the smell of sweat and unwashed bodies causing him to choke as he tries to pull in a breath. He reaches up to brush the mane of hair out of his mouth before trying to get the leverage to turn them over.

This is an old Five he realises, once he can kneel up and reach across to switch on the lamp on the desk. His face is more wrinkled than Klaus has ever seen it, with his beard full of grey hair. In fact, it might be the oldest he has ever seen Five, and that thought distracts him so thoroughly it takes him a minute to realise that this is also a _sick_ Five.

His lips look dry and chapped, and he is moaning softly between panting breaths. His limbs twitch even as he shivers, and his sweat covered skin shines in the light. He’s not well at all, Klaus realises, pulling the spare blanket from the end of the bed and draping over his older brother, his own headache almost forgotten in concern.

“Fire,” Five whimpers suddenly, tossing his head. “Fire…. ‘n’ dead. All dead.”

Klaus winces, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead and pulling a face at the heat coming off his brother. _Definitely a fever_.

“The eye!” Five croaks, his hands trying to grasp at the sheets. “The eye. No… ‘s important.”

“Yes, very important, I’ve got the eye for you,” Klaus says soothingly, sweeping his brother’s long hair back from his face. He’s not really sure what to do – whenever they are sick their father ignores them, letting Mom fuss over them and Pogo tell him when they are ready to return to training. Usually, Mom tucks them up in bed and tells them to rest, bringing them soups and snacks, and shooing the others away so that they don’t catch it as well.

“The eye,” Five sobs, “everyone dies.”

Klaus’ chest hurts. His brother is obviously caught in some kind of fever-induced nightmare, and there is nothing he can do to soothe it. He sighs, tucking Five’s long hair behind his ear and stepping away to change into his pyjamas. He switches the lamp off, and carefully climbs over Five to wedge himself in the sliver of space between his brother and the wall, slipping under the blanket and forcing himself not to flinch as he presses up against sweaty skin.

In the soft glow of the string lights, he can just make out the glimmer of tear tracks on his brother’s face, and he wraps his arm around Five’s shoulder and pulls him close, tucking Five’s head under his chin and murmuring nonsense reassurance under his breath as he tries to settle them both down to sleep.

The next morning, he wakes up an hour before his alarm, alone in the rumpled and clammy sheets. With a thought to wish that Five gets better quickly, whenever he is, he sets to digging out his paints and starts to add to the work above his bed. A stark white eye, and the foreboding warning of the ‘day we die’.

Because why not, Five’s feverish nightmare _totally_ fits the aesthetic he has going on here.

* * *

**The Apocalypse. Five has just turned 25 he thinks (maybe he is still 24).**

He stumbles forward out of his displacement, tripping as his suddenly bare toes catch on something, his arms wheeling until he manages to grasp the edge of an old table and catch his balance again. With a sigh he looks up, curious about when and where he has landed.

It is a strange thing, but somehow he usually knows if he has travelled forwards. Whenever he had tried to explain it to Klaus or Dolores before, he could never find the words to capture just how he could just sense it. He just _knows_ somehow, when he is ahead of himself in time. It’s most peculiar.

But it’s always interesting to get a glimpse of where he might be in the future, to see how he and Dolores come up with clever solutions, and find better places to live. And this place is _very_ interesting.

For one, it looks thoroughly lived in. Not just a temporary shelter, or a winter bunker, but somewhere almost homely, and with clear signs of settling. Somehow, somewhere, his future self has found a building with four sturdy walls, a roof, and even a working door by the looks of it. The two windows are covered by old tarps (and is that the red and yellow circus canvas he has been carrying around since he was 16 he can see?) and further blocked off by bookcases to keep the wind out.

Most of the shelves are filled – some with supplies and others with tools, but most of the shelves hold books. Several shelves are just lined with textbooks – apparently, this Five has kept anything he could get his hands on relating to physics, or math, or time; but several of the shelves hold smaller volumes, a mix of paperback and hardbacks that are clearly fictional. He feels a pang of jealousy that this Five can collect so many books - that he clearly doesn’t have to consider their value against the realities of the space and weight of his wagon.

He trails his calloused fingers lightly across the spines, recognising some of the classics that he and Ben had traded as children, mixed in with some more contemporary offerings that he assumes belong to Dolores. And there, in pride of place on the eye-level shelf is a battered and incomplete collection of The Chronicles of Narnia, with the same tattered hardback copy he’d been carrying around since he was a teenager, nestled safely in the middle. The book is so familiar to him that it doesn’t matter that the covering on the spine has cracked and started to peel away – he would know it anywhere.

He turns away sharply, blinking away the sting in his eyes.

The thing he tripped over on arrival turns out to be the edge of a rug – one of three laid down across the concrete floor. Five curls his toes curiously in the faded red patterned carpet, wondering why he hasn’t thought to collect a rug before (except, he knows the answer; they are _heavy_ \- too heavy to take with him when he moves, and something he would hate to leave behind). Across the room, next to the thickest and warmest-looking of the rugs, is a narrow bed.

An honest to god, metal framed and complete with a mattress, bed.

A _bed._

Five stares in shock, stepping over numbly to press his hands into the blankets, half expecting his hands to sink through it – simply a trick his mind is playing on him. But they don’t- the firmness of the old (and smelly, but at this point Five really doesn’t care) mattress pressing back against his hands. With a gasp, he turns and slowly sits down on the edge, the metal frame and mattress springs creaking loudly like the sweetest music under his weight.

A real bed.

A bed!

Not a pile of old clothes and fabric covered with a blanket to make a nest. Not a makeshift hammock that would snap and fall down in the middle of the night when he turned over. No, an actual bed, with a real mattress with springs and everything. A real bed that sometime in the future he will be able to sleep in every night. He smooths his hands over the tattered blankets and smiles slightly. He is going to have a real bed!

The new vantage point allows him to see the chair in the corner where Dolores’ is sat. He winces as he meets her gaze, which is loaded with her dissatisfaction at just how long it has taken him to notice her.

“Sorry Dolores – I didn’t see you over there,” he says, still running his fingertips over the ragged edges of the blanket. Then he frowns, glancing around the room again as if he will spot himself crouching behind a bookcase ready to jump out and shout ‘boo’. With a shrug, he lets himself fall back onto the mattress, chuckling at the sheer joy of _comfort,_ before coughing as dust billows into the air around him. He misses Dolores’ reply as his eyes drift shut almost against his will.

***

The next thing Five knows he is being woken up by a foot to the gut. With a wheeze, he rolls away to the end of the bed, clasping a hand to his stomach as he tries to pull in a full breath. Blinking against the murky light, it takes a second for his eyes to adjust enough to see his older self further up the bed.

By the looks of it, he has jumped a fair amount forwards (unless this isn’t the Five of the time returning, but actually an even older Five displacing backwards). This older Five has a well-worn and creased face, his long hair and beard a firm grey with creeping white, no hint of the black hair Five sports now. Five’s heart sinks, he had been hoping that he would get out of hell before he got old, but it is looking less and less likely, judging by how poorly groomed this older Five is. After all, Five might keep his beard, and he might appreciate the protection it offers him, especially in winter, but he isn’t sure he would keep it if he had the choice. And if he did keep it, he certainly wouldn’t keep it so long that he could braid it.

But he’d still hoped. Still hopes every time he sees an older self that it is not really _his_ older self – that they could all just be different iterations of the original, each living a slightly improved and shorter penance in hell. That maybe he, himself, the present Five, won’t have to go back and bury his siblings a third time in _his_ personal future, but will instead be that iteration that manages to cheat time and fate, to go back and correct his mistakes so that his family can live out their happily ever afters.

His older self whimpers as Five stands up, kicking at the mattress again with his feet and his large-knuckled hands clenching into fists. His eyes are screwed shut, but as Five steps up to the head of the bed he notices thin tear tracks leaking away from the corners of his eyes, threading along the creases of his skin and into his hairline. He takes deep, gasping breaths, punctuated with the occasional “ _No! Not again,”_ muttered under his breath.

Five frowns, leaning down to grasp his shoulder and shake him. “Shhh. Wake up!” he says, frowning when all it seems to do is quiet the whimpering. He lifts a hand to his older self’s forehead and brushes away the straggly hair before pressing the back of his hand to the hot and sweaty skin, the way he remembers Grace used to do whenever they were sick as children.

“Definitely a fever,” he mutters, stepping away from the bed and into the middle of the room, spinning around slowly as he looks for where his older self might have stored his water and supplies. He is in luck – a table against the back wall has a large mixing bowl that he guesses serves as a wash basin, with a large plastic bottle of water next to it. There is a pile of shirts and socks on the floor underneath – dirty judging by the rank smell that wafts up as Five disturbs the pile and pulls out a couple of t-shirts. He drops them in to the bowl and pours some water over them, making sure they are well soaked before picking them up one by one and wringing out the excess water, nose wrinkling at the brown-black water that falls back into the bowl.

He folds the first shirt and goes back to his older self, draping it over his forehead the way he remembers from when he had headaches after training. Then he brings the bowl across to the bedside, and uses the second shirt and the leftover water to try and rinse away the clammy sweat from his older self’s skin. He glances over at Dolores, who gives him a worried look back before focussing again on his older self.

His older self clearly isn’t well, but he has no idea what has caused it.

“Well Dolores, looks like it is my turn to play nursemaid,” he says, dropping the shirt back in the bowl and setting it on the floor beside the bed. “Let’s hope I stick around long enough for him to get back on his feet. Now where does he keep his spare clothes…?”

And so begins several days of Five working to nurse his older self back to health. He uses what water he dares to spare for cool compresses, sitting up through the night and reading ‘The Last Battle’ aloud by the light of the fire, nestled into the curve of Dolores’ arm. His older self’s fever finally breaks the next morning, but he doesn’t stir until the afternoon, roused by the smell of the instant noodles Five is making in a pot over the fire. He is weak, his cheeks looking sunken under his beard and his skin papery dry from dehydration. Five helps him hobble to the privy pile, and lets his older self show him the make-shift water distillery that he has dug outside. He carefully indulges his older self when he insists on counting the spoons, and checking the order of the books on the book case three times before allowing Five to settle him back in the bed to rest.

Five only tries to ask about the strange symbols drawn into the margins of ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ once.

He doesn’t like the way his older self shuts down, retreating back into himself and refusing to answer. He doesn’t like the way he mutters, listing aloud how many items he has, and where they are kept, reciting the order of the books on the shelves over and over again until he falls asleep.

Five and Dolores share an uneasy look.

No, Five doesn’t like it at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, please take my offering of some more sick Five and a check-in with Klaus, because I'm sure we've all been missing him.
> 
> These last few, and the next few, chapters have been fun to plan because I'm getting to do set up for some bigger things I have in the pipeline which is so *exciting*. Also, on a scary note, my consolidated draft document is telling me that this story is now 74k and growing, and that its gonna be atleast 30 chapters I think. I originally set out to do maybe 20ish chapters / 60k! The next chapter is probably going to be three weeks away again, so I can try to build up a little bit of writing buffer for myself, but I will likely be dropping another chapter of Tripping through Time soon as a peace offering!
> 
> Once again, thank you all for the love and support for TTL. Special thanks for all the well wishes for my horse last chapter - I'm pleased to report that he's doing really well now, and seems to be on track for a full recovery.
> 
> Shout out to [PhantomViola](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomviola/pseuds/phantomviola) who has given me a really helpful lesson in punctuation and grammar. Over the next few weeks I will be going back into the already published chapters and correcting things such as my dialogue punctuation!
> 
> * * *
> 
> Once again, please take two recs:
> 
> [The Apocalypse that Wasn't by falseari](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28768356/chapters/70544241)  
>  **Summary:** A look at the ten days leading up to the 1963 Apocalypse, in the timeline Five missed.
> 
> This is a recent fic I've been really enjoying, teasing out how we got to that scene with the siblings united in the face of nuclear war, without Five there to round them up. 
> 
> [Heaven or Las Vegas by macaronigrille](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25045045/chapters/60657115)  
>  **Summary:** At first, it’s intimidating, in a way. Knowing that he has the ability to do this, to soak up this wealth of information and retain it in a way his brain had previously refused to do. He always thought of himself as a doorway, a gate between the living and the dead. Translation is just a different kind of door. One that is also his to hone, but one that he is not burdened with.
> 
> I love this one and am hoping it might start updating again soon? Either way there are some really interesting takes on Klaus' powers and how they could work.


End file.
